The Promis.e V8i SELECTseries 8 (08.11.13.57) is now available for download.

What’s New in Promis.e V8i SELECTseries 8

Overview

• Product Name / Licensing Changes
• Support for Newer Platforms and Operating Systems
• Cable Manager Enhancements
• Project Publisher Simplified
• Usability Enhancements
• CONNECT client Support
• ProjectWise Integration Enhancements
• Collaboration Enhancements
• Performance Improvements
• Improved security
• Academic License Support
• Improved Error Reporting
• Custom Report Development Enhancements

Product Name / Licensing Changes

• The software was renamed from promis●e to Promis.e
• The various license levels of Standard, Professional, and Enterprise have been consolidated to a single license level such that features are no longer associated with different license levels. This requires a new product code be added to your SELECT contract in order to activate Promis.e V8i SELECTseries 8. If you first purchased promis.e prior to Promis.e V8i SELECTseries 8, please create a service request as described in the Cannot activate Promis.e V8i SELECTseries 8 after upgrading article.

Support for Newer Platforms and Operating Systems

• Windows 8 32-bit
• Windows 8 64-bit
• Windows 10 32-bit
• Windows 10 64-bit
• ProjectWise Design Integration CONNECT Edition 10.00.00.20

Cable Manager Enhancements

The Cable Manager has been enhanced to support the following functionality:

• You now have the ability to swap the ‘from-to’ targets of a conductor.
• You now have the ability to change the assigned cable family from the Cable Manager.
• You now have the ability to reorder the conductors in the Cable Manager by selecting rows and using the move up/down buttons.

Project Publisher Simplified

We have removed the export to DWG, DXF, and send to printer features from the Project Publisher to make this tool focused upon PDF output. If you need to export to DWG or DXF the Batch Converter Tool supplies this functionality today and can be found in the Output>Plot & Publish task menu.

Usability Enhancements

• When renaming a terminal you are now given the option to rename all terminals that share the device ID.
• The Catalog Manager now gives you a count of the total symbols in the selected catalog.
• You now have the ability to specify a particular setup configuration to load in your desktop shortcut. You can modify the shortcut target path as follows where “IEC Default” is the name of the setup configuration:

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Bentley\Promise V8i\Promise\Promise\PromiseStarter.exe" "-W@IEC Default"

• We now remember the last path to a .prj file used in the Restore Project dialog.
• In the URL field of the parts database we now recognize relative paths.

Assume we create a folder in the Promis.e Data path: C:\ProgramData\Bentley\promis-e V8i\promise Data\MyFolder

We can use a special variable (such as %data%) to replace it. Then the relative path in URL would be: File:// %data%\MyFolder

Now we support the following variables below:

%datafolder%: This is the Promis.e data folder.

%projectfolder%: This is the folder where your project resides.

%pagefolder%: This is the folder that the active page resides in.

• You can now add a hyperlink to an object and pass it the path to a program’s EXE file to execute another program from a hyperlink.
• In the Parts Database Manager you are now able to copy/paste attribute text values from one record to another without needing to open the attributes dialog.
• In previous versions if you drew a wire in a diagonal direction you would receive an Engineering Design Consideration notifying you that you are drawing a diagonal wire. This message has been removed now since the software recognizes diagonal wire connections to a connection point now.
• You can now open multiple sessions of the software simultaneously and work on different projects and pages with those sessions.

CONNECTION Client Integration

CONNECT integration provides a common environment for comprehensive project delivery. By leveraging a Common Environment you can productively integrate Modeling and documentation workflows across disciplines for projects of any size and complexity. You can easily access, share, and manage all your Data throughout the project and asset lifecycle. You can make better decisions with immediate feedback and clear insight made possible through complete visibility into design and project Performance.

You can now login to Bentley CONNECT and specify a CONNECT project to associate your Promis.e project with. In the New Project or Modify Project dialogs you can browse the list of existing CONNECT projects or create your own. You can find more information on Bentley CONNECT on our website.

ProjectWise Integration Enhancements

• Users are now able to select their own document environment for use with Promis.e. The document environment is now project dependent as well which makes it possible for you to use different environments for different projects if you so desire.
• The software no longer uses hardcoded values for the storage area, working directory, or class library making it possible for you to select the values you prefer.
• When deleting projects and pages that are reference files to other projects you now get a more meaningful message alerting you to this fact.
• If you now change your ProjectWise and symbol text attribute mappings the software will now automatically refresh the property values in ProjectWise based on the modified mapping.
• All title block variables are now available in the ProjectWise attribute mapping dialog.
• Cable Text attributes are now included in the ProjectWise Component Indexing.
• The software now properly respects a ProjectWise workflow state’s security and folder permissions.
• The Project Manager now uses the same status icons as ProjectWise Explorer to indicate a document’s status. Also, you can right click on the column headings to turn on the display of the workflow state as well.
• If a document is checked out and you attempt to backup a project using the project backup tool the software will give you an alert that there are documents checked out and give you the option of proceeding or not.
• You are now able to copy read-only pages of a template project in ProjectWise to new projects with read/write access.

Collaboration Enhancements

• The Import Drawings command in the Project Manager is now able to import an orphaned Promis.e DGN file and rebuild the intelligence of the drawing upon import. You can now import DWG files as well. Some additional UI enhancements were also done to improve the usability of the tool.
• We have improved the i-model data exchange workflow between Promis.e and Bentley Raceway And Cable Management in the following ways:
• Previously you were required to define all your cables in a single line diagram in order for them to appear in the generated Promis.e i-model.       Now you have the additional option of just defining them in a schematic and they will still be output in the i-model.
• You can now specify the voltage of the cable as a cable attribute rather than needing to specify the voltage as a wire property.
• The Device table in the Promis.e database now keeps track of a unique GUID for each device or cable so that we can uniquely identify it and track even ID changes when exchanging data.

Performance Improvements

We have made an attempt to improve the performance of several features in the software to reduce the negative impact of higher latency networks. We have reduced the number of queries being sent to the project database and cached some data to reduce the chattiness to the project database. A few other types of performance optimizations were also made. The following features have been optimized:

• Project Restore: Instead of restoring the database records one by one we now write the contents of each database table at one time.
• In the Options > User Options > Viewing Preferences you can now disable the toggle named, “Fit View on page open” which causes the software to perform a Zoom > Fit View whenever opening a drawing file rather than just opening it to the last saved view. This will make the page open operation faster.
• Update Wiring Diagram performance was improved.
• Copy Page performance was improved.
• Improved the performance of launching the Wire Manager.
• Improved the performance of compiling connections which is executed by many other features.
• Improved the performance of the Project Publisher.
• Improved the performance of the macro placement and deletion.
• Improved the performance of the Cable Manager.
• Improved the performance of the Search for Wire Links feature.
• The wait time while browsing ProjectWise folders in the Project Manager has been reduced.
• Plot pages command no longer attempts to open and update all pages that you are printing unless there are pending changes to those pages that require updating.

Improved Security

We have improved the database security to meet product security standards. The software now installs a unique security certificate on each machine that is used to encrypt/decrypt the database password.

NOTE: One implication of this change is that each setup.xml will now have a unique certificate thumbprint ID that is only valid for the certificate on that one machine. This means you won’t be able to copy the setup.xml from one machine to another. If you want to be able to do that you can obtain your own certificate from a certificate authority and have it created so that it can be deployed on multiple machines. You can then edit the thumbprint ID in the setup.xml to use the new certificate that you obtain.

See the Create a security certificate for password encryption article.

Academic License Support

This release now properly recognizes an academic license and displays appropriate notices such as, “For Academic Use Only” in prints and reports.

Improved Error Reporting

• The software now includes stack traces in all unhandled errors making it easier to identify the source of the issue so that we can resolve it in future patches more easily.
• Some error handling was inefficiently logging data which has now been optimized.

Custom Report Development Enhancements

• You now have the ability to specify sorting and filtering options for custom reports that you create using the Sorting and Filters dialogs within the Run Reports dialog.
• The following new API methods have been added to the software that you can take advantage of to customize which report templates are displayed in the Run Reports dialog.
• PopulateTree (List<string> categories): You can pass this method the list of report categories that you want the Run Reports dialog to display.
• PopulateTemplates (List<string> templates, string defaultTemplate) : You can pass this method a list of the templates you want displayed in the Run Reports dialog and even specify a default template to use. Passing a NULL value to the templates will cause it to list all report templates.
• AppendOneTemplate (string category, string templatename, bool check): You can specify a category and a template name that you want to add to the list of displayed reports in the Run Reports dialog. Passing a true value to the ‘Check’ property will mark the report as selected when the dialog is displayed.

Links

Readme

Resolved Issues

How to download the promis.e software

Updating and Upgrading Promis.e