Release Notes - build 467610

Wednesday, 18 May 2011 19:48

The following improvements were deployed to needlebase.com:

• New Modeling UI. Major changes to the UI for data modeling. It's no longer necessary to build a data model before going to your first data source; instead you can add new data types and corresponding tag buttons on the fly. You can always go back to edit the complete data model by clicking the model link at the top of every page, but the UI for that has changed too. New help documents are available, including a new introductory tutorial that takes you step-by-step through the process of creating a new database, and reference pages for various data modeling tasks. Please also see our general blog posting for more details.

• "Domain" name change. We've been using the word "domain" to refer to an online database on needlebase.com. This has confused many people familiar with the word's use on the Internet. So we've stopped using this word, and have started using the word "database" instead. All our UI screens and documentation have been updated.

• New "data" link. It's always been possible to view the data in your database by clicking on the name of the database displayed near the top of the page in most Needle UI screens. This was not intuitive to many people, so we've added a new data link in the banner at the top of the page that will take you to the same place, the starting page for the Needle Data Explorer.

• "Check data" link renamed. The old check data link has been renamed data preview. It still provides the same functionality of taking you to an isolated view of the data that will be collected from the current source page once a full data collection is run. This is a good way to confirm that you are collecting the right data on the page, and that your tags have been placed accurately.

• City, State, and Country data formats. The City, State, and Country components of the existing Address data format are now usable on their own for independent data. When you know you don't really want a full address but only want one of these address components, this provides a finer grain of control over the collected data.