Release Notes 1.8.0 Beta 2

February 11, 2011

This version of OpenMRS is a prerelease and not considered worthy for production use. Its function is to give users an idea of what to expect in the upcoming major release (1.8.0) and help discover any possible obscure new bugs.

What's New since version 1.7?

Version 1.8.0 Beta 2 of OpenMRS has a couple of new features but our main focus over the past couple of months has been on addressing performance bottlenecks in the core application and several modules that we deemed widely used, it is highly recommended to upgrade the modules to their latest versions to maximize the benefits this release has to offer. You may also visit Performance Tuning page and find out how best to tune your installation for better performance. You can download OpenMRS 1.8 Beta 2 to try/test it.

Performance Improvements

  • The Patient Dashboard and a number of other pages load faster.
  • Search results are returned in a shorter time (e.g., when searching for patients, encounters, concepts, etc.)
  • The cohort builder has been sped up.
  • The data exports feature has been improved to consume less memory and attain better speed
  • More performance focused work has been done in the modules that are commonly used across most implementations, feel free to browse the module repository to check for any new versions and upgrade.

You can visit Performance improvement statistics page to view the performance measurement comparisons between version 1.8.0 Beta 2 and the 1.7.0 stable release.

New Features:

  • Program Location Module has been incorporated into the Core application
  • Improved workflow when adding a new program and state
  • Added complex obs BinaryDataHandler to core
  • Showing of a list of currently logged in users
  • Improve workflow when ending a program with a terminal state
  • Ability to archive HL7 to file system instead of moving it to file system
  • Ability to view schema of a published form

A huge thanks to the 44 people that contributed code to this release: ajanthan, aravindm, astelmashenko, bmamlin, bwolfe, crecabarren, cristian.chircu, diptanuc, djazayeri, dthomas, firzhan, gigix, hablutzel1, harsha.cse, jKeiper, knoll_frank, l0s, luzhuangwei, mblanchette, mcunderlik, mharrison, misha680, mogoodrich, msambath, mseaton, ndutta, nribeka, n.nehete, r0bb, raff, shazin, slorenz, sneha, stuartgunter, sunbiz, syhaas, thadk, tks423, uday_rayala, umashanthi, upul, wyclif, yhemanth, zabilcm

Not to mention all the people that contributed in countless other ways to support this release and be a great part of the shaping of this release: pbiondich, mdowney, dawn, nareesa, zeshan.

Community Input

We welcome any user to download OpenMRS 1.8 Beta2 and try it out, give us feedback, and potentially bug reports on this release. We especially ask current users try this version out on their own database and with their custom modules.

Even if you don't have time to do any thorough testing, we'd really appreciate it if you can upgrade a copy of your database to the 1.8 data model, and report on any errors than may occur in the upgrade script.

If a new bug is found, send an email to one of the mailing lists or create a new JIRA ticket (click upper right icon) Signup for an OpenMRS ID

We do not recommend using this in a production environment!

Download

OpenMRS 1.8.0 Beta 2 represents version 1.8.0.18204

Download OpenMRS 1.8 Beta 2

Bundled Modules

These modules are bundled with the 1.8 beta2 openmrs.war download. They will be started automatically.

  • Logic 0.5
  • Form Entry 5.0.1
  • HTML Form Entry 1.7.1
  • Reporting 0.5.3.3
  • Reporting Compatibility 1.5.3
  • Serialization.xstream 0.2.5
  • Xforms 3.9.8
  • HTML Widgets 1.5.6.1

Non-Backwards-Compatible Changes for Developers

  • Search widgets were converted from dojo to jquery, test your searches to ensure that they are working properly and where necessary convert them to use the new widgets.
  • The short patient form was re-written with spring annotations, this will certainly break any module attempting to alter this form's view or trying to inject any logic into the controller.
  • The search pop ups were replaced with jquery auto complete.

Changelog since 1.8 beta

Bugs

  • [TRUNK-1802] - When you're asked to confirm you want to accept and continue in the initial setup wizard, the changeset has already been marked as done
  • [TRUNK-1889] - When voiding a patient via the standard Patient Form, validation does not enforce entering a "void reason"
  • [TRUNK-1930] - Update dateChanged and changedBy fields on Auditable objects through a hibernate interceptor
  • [TRUNK-1938] - The Civil Status field on the short patient form doesn't display or set the value
  • [TRUNK-1939] - Default Cursor Placement on Find/Create Patient Screen
  • [TRUNK-1941] - specialTokens property on addressSupport bean in openmrs-servlet.xml is wrong
  • [TRUNK-1942] - Unknown column error when a user enters multiple words in the concept search box
  • [TRUNK-1944] - Cannot search for a concept using a search term with spaces
  • [TRUNK-1958] - In web layer, Spring CustomDateEditor initialization should be modified to better prevent against bad dates
  • [TRUNK-1960] - Concept Search from View/Edit Concept Page Returns to Main Concept Search Page, and yields no results
  • [TRUNK-1961] - Error: "Problem required" when attempting to add a problem on the patient dashboard
  • [TRUNK-1966] - Extra Space between Given and Family Names
  • [TRUNK-1967] - Patient Search When Adding New Encounter Doesn't Finish with Complete Search Terms
  • [TRUNK-1970] - LogicService.eval methods that take a String should treat it as an expression string, not as a literal token name
  • [TRUNK-1973] - BinaryDataHandler getObs method shouldn't close input stream
  • [TRUNK-1974] - java.lang.ClassCastException on new patient screen
  • [TRUNK-1975] - BinaryDataHandler leaves input stream open
  • [TRUNK-1977] - PatientService savePatient method should should not validate Patient Identifiers if the patient has been voided
  • [TRUNK-1979] - Error when trying to set a patient relationship through the patient dashboard using Internet Explorer
  • [TRUNK-1981] - In Chrome, the edit and view links on the encounters portlet on the patient dashboard don't work right
  • [TRUNK-1986] - DataIntegrityViolationException when trying to delete a patient
  • [TRUNK-1988] - Javascript is broken in pages that include the OpenMRS header with DO_NOT_INCLUDE_JQUERY
  • [TRUNK-1999] - CreatedBy, VoidedBy and ChangedBy values on the address Portlet are not displayed
  • [TRUNK-2000] - Admin page disappears if a bad module is uploaded
  • [TRUNK-2001] - Liquibase changeset preConditions missing "onFail" attribute
  • [TRUNK-2002] - Update Maintenance wizard is not redirecting properly
  • [TRUNK-2012] - Update pom to configure releasing using the maven-release-plugin

New Features

  • [TRUNK-1948] - Speed up fetching cohorts of patients (will speed up the logic module)
  • [TRUNK-1953] - Change method signatures in LogicService, LogicContext and Rule to allow some rules to be faster and more lightweight
  • [TRUNK-1957] - Compress json data with gzip
  • [TRUNK-1968] - LogicService needs methods to evaluate multiple rules at once on a single patient
  • [TRUNK-1969] - Change method signatures in LogicDataSource to allow a NAME property on the data source (instead of specifying that in spring xml)
  • [TRUNK-1972] - Create a new PersonAddress/PersonName when an address/name field is changed respectively in the short patient form
  • [TRUNK-1998] - Add Khmer messages.properties translation