In the v10.0.0.1680 (May 17, 2023) release of OpenGround Professional, significant changes were made to improve the speed and integrity of how calculated fields are reprocessed.
The changes may impact certain workflows, particularly how System Admin users modify field calculations, as described below.
What has changed?
Previously, when the Calculation Expression for a field was changed in System>Configuration Packs>Manage Model, upon Save, you would be presented with a ‘Select Projects’ dialog. Calculations would be reprocessed for the selected projects at that time. Unselected projects could be reprocessed later within the project. (Please see this article for additional info on the previous behavior.)
Now, upon Save of a change to a Calculation Expression, you will not be presented with a ‘Select Projects’ dialog. Instead, the calculations will automatically reprocess for all Projects using that configuration pack. The calculations will be performed in the background, and you can continue using OpenGround Professional.
If you open a Project and the calculations are still in process for that project, the message below will be presented:
You can also check the status of the calculations using the Project>Check Calculations button:
How might this impact workflows for changing Calculation Expressions?
With the previous reprocessing behavior, a common workflow when changing a Calculation Expression was to select a small number of projects to test if the new expression worked as expected (to avoid a long wait to reprocess calculations across all projects).
This workflow will no longer be possible because calculations will automatically reprocess for all projects.
If you are a new organization implementing OpenGround, this will not likely have a large impact as you will have a small number of projects in your database and the calculations will reprocess quickly.
If your organization has many projects in your database, you may want to test your Calculation Expressions differently to avoid delays while calculations reprocess and to prevent impacts to active projects...
One suggestion is to clone a temporary copy of your current configuration pack for testing purposes (System>Configuration Packs>Create Pack). When you have confirmed your new expression is working properly, you can then update your expression in your production configuration pack.
While this might introduce some inconvenience for certain organizations, we believe the benefits are important. The changes ensure data is consistent across all projects, as well as greatly improve the speed and reliability of calculation reprocessing. In the future, we will investigate new features to better test Calculation Expression changes.