What's New in ThingWorx Platform 9.2.0
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PTC has permanently removed the ThingWorx Platform version of 9.2.0. This has been done based on an identified issue involving the license storage. To view more details about this issue, click here. A new version of 9.2.1 has been posted and is available to download that will provide a fix that addresses the issue. PTC strongly advises utilizing 9.2.1 for new deployments or upgrades. For any concerns regarding timing or in process deployments, please contact PTC Technical Support.
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The following enhancements, known issues and limitations, and end-of-support information are part of ThingWorx 9.2.0.
For a list of fixed issues, refer to Fixed Issues in ThingWorx Platform 9.2.0.
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Enhancements
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Security
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Fixed potential security issues, including items proactively identified by vulnerability scanning software and PTC Quality Assurance testing. Please upgrade as soon as possible to take advantage of these important improvements.
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See this technical support article for important recommendations regarding the use and update of third-party software for ThingWorx.
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Starting from ThingWorx Flow 9.2.0 and later versions, it is expected that ThingWorx Flow will start throwing exception for applications connected to ThingWorx Flow and configured with a self-signed certificate. In order to avoid these exceptions, append the self-signed certificate to extra.crt file. For more detail see Make ThingWorx Flow work properly when self-signed certificate is used for connected applications.
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Platform
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Java 11 is required for upgrades to ThingWorx 9.2.0.
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In Composer, when a snippet containing an infotable is inserted to modify a service in the Me/Entities section, additional Data Shape aspects are now included. These aspects include dataShape, isRequired,isPrimaryField, defaultValue, minimumValue, and maximumValue.
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Added support for configuration tables to the following entity types: projects, notifications, and gadgets.
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As part of a continuing effort to improve the ThingWorx permissions and security model, PTC has made substantial changes to the way in which permissions are stored in ThingWorx 9.2.0 and later. While the impacts to users should be minimal, there are some slight procedural changes to take into account when upgrading. See Importing Entities in 9.2 and Later for more information.
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If you are importing entities into ThingWorx 9.2, unless principal information is part of entities.xml, you must import the principals.xml before the entities.xml. See Importing Entities in 9.2 and Later for more information.
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Audit Subsystem:
• For the Audit Subsystem, added functionality for generating a failure message if an audit message fails to be written. The failure messages are written to the audit log.
• Administrators can configure popup alerts, SMS, and email alerts for individual users, user groups, and organizations to be generated by this feature.
• By default this behavior is disabled. Administrators can enable it when configuring the Audit Subsystem.
• This improvement can assist ThingWorx customers in complying with the U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), requirement AU.3.046: Alert in the event of an audit logging process failure.
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Improved the PostJSON, PostText, PostXML, PostMultipart, LoadJSON, LoadXML, LoadText, PutJSON, PutText, and PutXML REST APIs to return the responseHeaders, responseStatus, and statusCode in the JSON body.
The result will be composed by the following parts:
<body>^ ResponseStatus= { protocolVersion=<protocol>:statusCode=<statuscode>:reasonPhrase=<reasonphrase> }^ ResponseHeaders= { <headers> }
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SubLoggerLevels can now be set for the following services: GetLogLevel, GetSubLoggerLevels, SetSubLoggerLevel, and RemoveSubLoggerLevels.
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You can set session parameters using an asynchronous service.
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Installers
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PostgreSQL 13 is supported in ThingWorx 9.2 as a model and data persistence provider (database). When upgrading using the ThingWorx Installer, all upgrades and migrations should be completed before migrating to PostgreSQL 13. As a reminder, always back up your data before migrating or upgrading, including when upgrading databases.
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Mashup Builder
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Mashup Layouts
• Added a new layout template that includes the Menu Bar widget to the New Mashup, New Mashup Template, and New Master windows in Composer. The template lets you build mashups with menus, without manually configuring the layout for the Menu Bar widget.
• You can now enable expand and collapse functionality for any container in a layout. In previous versions of ThingWorx, this feature was only available for fixed containers that are on the edge of the mashup layout.
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You can now add custom reminders for mashup parameters using the Configure Mashup dialog box. Reminder messages are displayed on the Reminders panel at design time.
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New Web Component Widgets
Waterfall Chart—You can use this widget to create a chart visualization that highlights changes to an initial data value over a period of time.
Preview Web Component Widgets
The following widgets are added as preview widgets, which include a subset of features from the current standard widgets. Additional features and migration support are planned for future releases of ThingWorx.
• Menu Bar (Preview)—Enables you to display a vertical navigation menu on the left side of a mashup. You can configure the Menu Bar items using Menu entities, or infotable data that is defined using the MenuEntry Data Shape.
• Grid (Preview)—Allows you to sort and organize complex data from an infotable into rows and columns. You can format and display columns for a number of ThingWorx base types, including STRING, BOOLEAN, HTML, DATETIME, NUMBER, and more.
• Toolbar (Preview)—This widget groups user interface elements, such as buttons, check boxes, links, and toggle buttons, in a compact area. You can configure the toolbar items using an infotable from a data service based on the ToolbarAction Data Shape.
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Widget Migration
• The expand/collapse container functionality of the legacy Layout widgets is now migrated to flexbox containers.
• The DataLabelN properties of legacy Label, XY, and Time Series charts are now migrated to the standard Line Chart and Bar Chart widgets.
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Widget Enhancements
• Chart widgets under the Themable category are now enhanced with the following features:
◦ Reference lines—Added support for horizontal and vertical reference lines on charts. You can use widget properties and bindings to add and configure the value, label, and orientation of each reference line on a chart.
◦ Custom tooltip content—You can now define custom tooltips for data values on charts. You can format the tooltips by adding line breaks, titles, and data from an infotable.
◦ Disabled data—Added support for disabling data on charts. You can now indicate a disabled state and prevent users from interacting with specific data on the chart.
◦ Data selection—Added support for multiple data selection. You can now pass selected data on the charts using the SelectedRows property of the data service and the SelectedData widget property.
◦ Added support for custom data series labels in the legend area using the DataLabelsN widget property. In previous versions, the labels were displayed using the infotable column name. You can now add spaces and special characters to show more detailed labels.
◦ You can now permanently rotate the tick marker labels on the horizontal axis of a chart at a custom angle using the HorizontalAxisLabelsRotation property. In previous versions of ThingWorx, labels were automatically rotated 90 degrees when horizontal space was not available.
• The Date Time Picker widget is enhanced with the following features:
◦ Added a RangeChanged event that triggers when the selected date range is changed.
• Tabs widget—Added a property that enables you to control the alignment of tab labels.
• Text Field widget—Added a FocusLost event that triggers when a user clicks an area outside the widget or presses the TAB key while editing the text value.
• Added new types of labels to the drop-down list of widget properties that enable you to configure the type of label.
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CSS Class Change to flex-container-bounding-box DOM Elements:
Changes have been made to our run time mashup CSS and CSS classes to address multiple layout issues where a widget was not scaling to the full size of its container. These changes may impact existing run time mashups, especially any that make use of custom CSS. PTC does not guarantee that your CSS will remain effective, and it’s possible that it will need to be adjusted with these run time changes.
Specifically, a DOM element CSS change was made for the root_flexcontainer-bounding-box when a flex-container was split into multiple children. The first child flex-container previously received the CSS class responsive, but any subsequent child flex-containers were getting the nonresponsive CSS class, even though the container was configured to be responsive. This has now been changed so that all child flex-containers get the responsive class. This may cause problems if you use this class in your custom CSS definitions.
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ThingWorx Flow
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ThingWorx Flow metrics added and displayed in ThingWorx Performance Advisor.
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Added support for configuring rotating log functionality after installation.
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OData and Windchill Connectors have the following new capabilities:
• Support for pagination under Windchill actions and functions
• Support for Order By using query actions through form for non-complex data types and discrete and raw queries based on user input
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Windchill Connector has the following new capabilities:
• Support for Change Management domain functionality introduced in WRS 2.2
• Ability to define scopes for the OAuth provider
• Added option to choose to get OData annotations
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Single Sign-On
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User authentication and authorization can now be conducted without requiring PingFederate integration. By using Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) or AD Federation Services (AD FS) as both a Central Authentication Server (CAS) and an identity provider (IdP), your users can be authenticated directly to ThingWorx and be authorized to access certain resources. These new single sign-on (SSO) capabilities are possible using the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 protocol.
These new SSO capabilities do not support the use of ThingWorx as a Resource Server.
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Azure IoT Hub Connector & OPC UA
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The ThingWorx Microsoft Azure Industrial IoT OPC UA Integration in ThingWorx Azure IoT Hub Connector, v.4.2.0, provides optimized OPC/UA batch telemetry processing, support for multiple consumers of IoT Hub data, and an upgrade of the Azure IIoT stack to v.2.7.206. For more information, see the ThingWorx Azure IoT Hub Connector Release Notes, v.4.2.0.
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ThingWorx Analytics
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Enhancements to ThingWorx Analytics include the following:
• The ability to include free-form text information when generating advanced analytics insight. A new TEXT opType supports the use of free-form text information so that key words and phrases from text data (such as comments, notes, or descriptions) can be related to outcomes. See Transforming Free-Form Text for Analysis.
• Expanded support for date/time formats in time series data. A new DATETIME dataType supports the use of date and time information is in standard formats, eliminating the need for additional data transformations. See OpType DataType Combinations
• The ENTITY_ID column is now optional when preparing time series data. When all the data belongs to a single entity, the entity will be inferred, eliminating the manual step of adding the ID. See OpType DataType Combinations.
• The use of a Java truststore is no longer required. To simplify configuration of SSL certificates, installers for both the Analytics Server and Platform Analytics automatically generate individual truststores as needed and import the required certificates. This change streamlines installation, provides more flexibility, and reduces the maintenance burden of supporting Java patches. See Security Considerations.
• New keys have been added to the utility script for updating encrypted passwords. See Updating Encrypted Keys and Passwords.
• The Asynchronous microservice can now detect metadata directly from the data included in the body of a request, without including a URI to a CSV data file.
• Analytics Builder now provides the following capabilities:
◦ A Copy ID button to automatically copy a specific Job ID without the need to view additional screens
◦ A Download Metadata button to retrieve the metadata definition from an existing dataset and save it as a JSON file for reuse
◦ Optional Description fields on all list pages
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Known Issues and Limitations
The following known issues and limitations exist in ThingWorx 9.2.0:
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Platform
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When upgrading to ThingWorx 9.2 with MSSQL as your database, you may get an error. If you have any migrated service, property, or event names with run time permissions configured and their name contains more than 256 characters, you will see the following error in the Application log:
Error in copying permissions: Problems migrating database
To fix this error, limit all service, property, and event names to less than 256 characters before upgrading.
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Mashup Builder
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Bootstrap 3.3.7 is no longer distributed as part of the ThingWorx Mashup run time environment. The impact of this change is that proprietary custom widget extensions that leveraged bootstrap will have appearance changes. To mitigate this impact, extensions that use bootstrap will need to be managed by accessing it internally.
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If you bind a Chip Based Data Filter widget to the Waterfall Chart in your mashup and set a condition to filter the chart data, the filtered result in the chart is displayed without the summary bars even when the summary bar data meets the filter condition. This will be fixed in a future release.
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End of Support Information
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As part of a continuous re-evaluation of our third-party software requirements, we regularly add and remove support for certain versions of operating systems. For the ThingWorx minor release currently targeted for the end of CY 2021, we are planning to end support for Windows Server 2016. PTC will continue to support Windows Server 2019 for the immediate future, and will consider supporting Windows Server 2022 once it becomes Generally Available (GA).
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For the ThingWorx release currently targeted for the middle of CY 2022, we are planning to end support for Ubuntu 18.04. PTC will continue to support Ubuntu 20.04 for the immediate future, and will consider supporting Ubuntu 22.04 once it becomes Generally Available (GA).
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