v90.0.0

Monthly release to be issued on May 27th, 2021.

Highlights

Dates

Formerly, dates columns were always imported as string in Toucan’s database. This is not the case anymore! Any new app will now handle dates as such. To activate this new behavior on existing apps (created prior to this release date), add cast_dates_to_string_at_insertion: false in the etl_config file.

Warning

Migration concerns

Once activated, this feature flag will change the type of existing date columns from string to date. Expect to:

• remove “convert text to date” steps in prepared datasets or queries that are no longer needed,
• add “convert date to text” steps if following steps needs to handle strings,
• eventually remove any date block in front_config file, as they may not be needed anymore.

Having columns understood as dates enables operations such as extracting year, day, week number, etc. It’s also easier for charts to order data historically automatically, without any configuration.

We also added new capabilities to import dates natively from Excels, Google Sheets and CSVs files!

We also removed the need of adding a date block to sorties’ and tiles’ queries. This block was already added automatically for you when using the Visual Query Builder, so the change will only affect those of you using the code mode.

Self-Hosted Breaking changes

Paid features

We added some protections for paid features (alerts, PDF report, data wall) for instances that we manage.

If you want those features to be activated, you will need to specify in your environment variables:

• for PDF Report: TOUCAN_PDF_REPORT=enable
• for Alerts: TOUCAN_ALERTS=enable
• for Datawall: TOUCAN_DATAWALL=enable

Headers

We added the header X-JSON-Flavor. It acts as a temporary feature flag to allow passing dates in a specific format through the JSON API. It’ll be removed in the next release.