First milestone of the XWiki Enterprise 2.2 version (Roadmap).

The highlights of this release are: the possibility to register wiki macros for any user or wiki, improvements of the import interface, support for OOXML (MS Office 2007) documents in the office import feature, started introducing the new Model, new UIs for viewing the contents of the document and attachment trash, and further improvements towards UI consistency and accessibility.

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki Enterprise 2.1.1)

New XAR Import UI

The XAR import interface has been completely revamped. The new interface (see screenshots below) now provides:

• More explicit options regarding revision history handling
• The new option to add a new version to existing documents instead of overriding them
• A rich UI that allows to select/unselect whole spaces at once
• Support for importing when no javascript is available. The UI degrades nicely to a less rich interface

UI for Deleted documents & attachments

While deleted documents and attachments have been stored in a trash instead of being completely deleted since XWiki 1.2, there was no general interface for viewing the contents of the trash. This has been remedied by the introduction of two new tabs in the wiki's Document Index, Deleted Documents and Deleted Attachments.

Both use the livetable, thus allowing filtering and ordering for easier browsing. A document from the trash can be viewed, permanently deleted, or restored if the location is still available.

The attachment trash contains only attachments deleted from a document, and not attachments that were deleted together with their owner document; in the latter case, the attachments are kept together with the document in the document trash. For attachments, there is no restore option yet, it will be implemented in a future release.

General UI improvements

• In the wiki source code viewer, allow to toggle line numbers faster from Javascript
• Enable full screen view when displaying the wiki source code (viewer=code)
• Internationalize macro descriptors
• ActionMenu: Add Profile submenu item to the "current user" menu
  
• Reorder the document actions in the "More actions" menu: copy, rename, delete
• More UI components make use of the (recently introduced) color theme

Contextual wikimacros

Previously, wiki macros could only be defined by users with administrator rights, and only in the main wiki (when in a virtual wiki farm). It's now possible for any user to register wiki macros, and in any wiki. However, this follows some user rights restrictions, preventing a limited user to write dangerous scripts available to all other users. For example, if the user does not have the proper rights, only he will see and use the macro he registered. To make the macro available globally, an administrator must re-save it.

Development improvements

• Added support for "xcontext" binding in 1.0 groovy macro
• Allow set to null in velocity
• Add an API method for creating a LinkedHashMap
• New APIs for accessing deleted attachments from the trash
• The class wizard should propose to add a SheetClass object to the class sheet
• Add support for 'on page' style extensions

Office import improvements

• Added support for Office2007 document formats

Blog improvement

• Add the Create a new post to category pages - when used by default select that category

Dependencies upgrade

• Upgraded to Groovy 1.7

New Model module with Reference implementation

The goal is to provide APIs to remove all String manipulations around documents and attachment names. It also introduces the concept of Reference for any entity of the model and the parser/serializer associated. For now Wiki, Space, Document and attachment are supported; classes objects and properties should come in milestone 2.

From a user point of view this will result in supporting any character in document names for example. In addition, this is also a step in the direction of supporting nested spaces (the storage would also need to be changed to support that).

In practice the existing code has not yet been fully refactored to benefit from the new implementation. The work has been started in XWiki Enterprise 2.2 Milestone 1 and will continue in XWiki Enterprise 2.2 Milestone 2 and beyond.

Miscellaneous

• Always use UTF-8 for URL encoding
• Attachments should produce document modification events

• Lots of accessibility fixes
• Lots of bugs fixes

Known issues

• Bugs we know about
• A regression was introduced in this release: Parent references are saved in the Database without the space prefix. The consequence is that getChildren() will fail to return all children when the current document is located in another space. A more direct consequence is that rename will not rename all pages having a parent pointing to the document being renamed. This has been fixed in XE 2.2M2 but you'll need to resave the documents to have their parents saved correctly in the database.

Backward Compatibility and Migration Notes

Important non-compatible changes

This means that the following script will generate a different result:

While previously the result would have been abc abc, now it is abc $s.

Special care must be taken care with constructs like the following:

Since null != '' in Velocity, now a different branch will be executed. The following rewrites work.

Works in both modes, with or without null allowed:
#set($var = '')
#set($var = $xwiki.methodThatMightReturnNull())
#if("$!var" != '')
  The method succeeded
#else
  The method failed
#end

Works only in the new mode, with null allowed, but is shorter, slightly faster, and more familiar for java developers:
#set($var = $xwiki.methodThatMightReturnNull())
#if($!var != $util.null)
  The method succeeded
#else
  The method failed
#end

General Notes

You may also want to import the default wiki XAR in order to benefit from the improvements listed above.

Migration Notes

• The new parser/serializer for document names comes with new features and changes some behaviors:
  • introducing escaping means:
    • \ which is now the escaping character needs to be doubled in full document name, as in Space.Docu
      ment, which means space Space and document Docu\ment
    • some generated documents names will now contains \ to escape thing like dot in a document name. For example Space.Docu\.ment means space Space and document Docu.ment
  • support for the syntax wikiname:Document has been dropped, so in this example "wikiname:Document" will be seen as the document name because no . has been found
• If you had Wiki Macros defined in your wiki before, you might want to edit them to check their visibility field since the notion of visibility was introduced in XE 2.2 and the default value is user-visibility.

Dependencies

This release includes the following modules in the specified versions since XWiki Enterprise 2.1.1 was released.

Core/Web

Applications

Plugins

Skins

Top Level POM

Tools