We’re pleased to announce the release of version 3.4.0.0 of the Lightning Conductor content rollup client-side web part! The following changes are included:
Updates to filters and formats
If you’re using Managed Metadata or Person or Group columns, we’ve improved the way you can select those values in filter and formatting conditions. Previously, you had to type a literal term or name, but now we’ve given you pickers for those field types.
When your column is a Managed Metadata column, you’ll now see a tag icon next to the text box. Clicking the tag icon will open a term store picker dialog, where you can select one or more terms to filter by.
Note that you can select multiple terms to filter or format by.
Note that if when you created the Managed Metadata column in your SharePoint list you selected the option to “Display the entire path to the term”, then you will need to select the Use term path as a value option when filtering on this column in the Lightning Conductor.
For Person or Group type columns, you now have a standard modern people picker to select user accounts.
Also related to filters: when you’re using a dynamic filter, such as page environment properties, our free Lightning Filters web part, or a another Lightning Conductor, there’s now an option to ignore the filter when the value is empty. Previously, when the connected filter was empty, and there were actually no items where that field was blank, then no results would display in the Lightning Conductor, and results would appear as you entered or selected filter values. Now you have the option to do the opposite: display all results if the filter is empty, and then the results are filtered down when a filter value is entered/selected. This has been a common customer request.
Another common request has been automatic currency and date formatting based on the locale of your SharePoint site. You have always been able to specify number and date formats by typing in standard formatting codes, but this new feature removes the need to do that. NOTE: This applies to the locale of the site in which the Lightning Conductor is located, not the site/s from which the data is being retrieved.
Export to Excel
Up until now, you have been able to export aggregated data to a CSV file, but many customers wanted to export data directly to Excel instead. With this update, the Export Data option in the Lightning Conductor will automatically save the output as an Excel file (.xlsx). When exporting to Excel, you’ll find for example that unformatted dates export as dates rather than text, which is helpful! Note also that there are options for each column (in the … menu) to exclude it from exporting, or to add a format just for exporting – this is not a new feature, but we mention it here as it may be relevant if exporting aggregated data is important to you. Below is an example of a custom JavaScript export format on a date field, which will export the year only, as a number.
If you do still wish to save as CSV, you can select that option in the Configure Command Bar section of the configuration panel of the Lightning Conductor instance. But saving to Excel is now the default behavior.
Lightning Bugs
We’ve also squashed a few Lightning Bugs in this release…
- Filtering wasn’t working in the built-in Planner/Tasks rollup – now it is!
- There was an issue with monthly recurring events not being displayed on their anniversary date in our built-in calendar XSL. Fixed now, but really our calendar JSON view is the better choice anyway when you’re using a modern web part. The XSL views are still supported, though, for backward compatibility.
- Speaking of our built-in calendar JSON view, there was an issue where a deleted occurrence of an all-day recurring event was still being displayed in the calendar view. This has been fixed.
- When using our built-in Data bar column format, the bar was not rendering when a text (fore) color was selected. Now you can specify a text color as well as a data bar:
- When using the Object Model rollup source (as opposed to Search or Graph), you can use a filter to limit the results to a specified Site Collection URL (or portion of one, using the Like operator). The =, <>, and Contains operators had not been working when the rollup scope was “Entire tenant”, but now they are. (Note that the Contains operator functions as it does in Search, so it’s really more like “Starts with” – if you want to filter by some text contained anywhere in the Site Collection URL, you should use Like or Match).
- We’ve fixed an issue with sorting text values when accented characters are used – so they’re now sorted correctly in alphabetic order rather than by the ASCII character code.
HOW TO GET THIS UPDATE: If you’re using the Lightning Conductor client-side web part in SharePoint Online (not dedicated or GCC), and if you already had the 3.2.0.0 package installed, then your Lightning Conductor instances should have updated automatically to 3.4.0.0. For anyone else, including on-prem customers, you can download the new build from our Download Center.
And if you don’t yet own the Lightning Conductor, you can learn more about it here.
