Funnelback 16 change log
The change log below provides details on changes that have been made in Funnelback since the v15.24 release. Please see what’s new in Funnelback 16 for an overview of the changes.
Use the filter to narrow down what’s in the list below, and the sort controls on each column to help locate what you are looking for.
| Type | Release version | Description | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
1 New and revised features |
16.10 |
Added option to upgrade utility to support importing resources in bulk by defining an affix. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.10 |
Provided a simple command line alias for running the upgrade utility. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.10 |
Provided a confirmation step before executing the upgrade utility command. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.10 |
Improved the upgrade utility so that configuration files that don’t apply to the current collection type (e.g. data sources, search packages) are now removed. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.10 |
Improved logic for the upgrading of collection IDs in existing configuration. This includes:
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1 New and revised features |
16.10 |
Improved the upgrade utility by adding detection of using deprecated functionality. This includes:
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1 New and revised features |
16.10 |
Fixed the upgrade utility handling of invalid component collections of a meta collection so that invalid collections are removed from the upgraded search package. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.10 |
Updated the default metadata mappings to detect descriptions added to Microsoft Word metadata. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.10 |
Improved the plugin documentation template that is created when generating a new plugin using the Maven archetype. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.10 |
Fixed a bug where scheduled analytics updates were not correctly set for collections upgraded from v15. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.10 |
Exposed reporting stop words configuration file via WebDav API for search packages and results pages. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.10 |
Fixed a bug in the administration dashboard where the |
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4 Important changes |
16.10 |
The default version of Handlebars used in the default template and knowledge graph widget preview has been upgraded to 4.7.7. |
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4 Important changes |
16.10 |
The default version of jQuery used with auto-completion and cache highlights widgets has been upgraded to 3.6.0. |
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4 Important changes |
16.10 |
Upgraded the Angular version to 12.2.15. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.8.3.3 |
The following plugins have been added: |
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1 New and revised features |
16.8.3.2 |
The following plugins have been added: |
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1 New and revised features |
16.8.3.1 |
The following plugins have been added: |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.8.3 |
Removed broken administration UI used to configure reporting email as since v16 those settings are configured via results page configuration UI. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.8.3 |
Upgrades log4j2 to version 2.17.1 to fix the security vulnerability where Apache Log4j2 Thread Context Lookup Pattern is vulnerable to remote code execution in certain non-default configurations. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.8.1 |
Upgrades log4j2 to version 2.15 to fix the security vulnerability where log4j2 JNDI features do not protect against attacker-controlled LDAP and other JNDI related endpoints. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.8 |
The following plugins have been added: |
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1 New and revised features |
16.8 |
Extended the metadata scraper filter to support a number of content checking rules. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.8 |
Extended the undesirable text filter to support separated or combined undesirable text sources and individual values provided via configuration keys. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.8 |
Extended the metadata normalizer filter to support XML documents. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.8 |
Added CGI parameters that enable a user to search for results containing a specific metadata class (set to any value), or results that are missing a specified metadata class. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.8 |
Fixed the positioning of the live chat widget so that it does not obscure other functionality. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.8 |
Fixed a bug in the upgrade utility where it did not correctly handle environment specific configuration keys. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.8 |
Fixed an issue where the collection tool would return an error for the index presence check. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.8 |
Restored access to data reports from the administration dashboard. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.8 |
Fixed an issue which resulted in some URLs being incorrectly handled in SEO auditor due to problems with URL encoding. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.8 |
Fixed an issue that caused counts for metadata on the metadata mapping screen to be incorrect or marked as not found. |
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4 Important changes |
16.8 |
The following plugins will automatically be upgraded due to upgrades to underlying dependencies.
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4 Important changes |
16.8 |
The default behaviour of the metadata scraper filter has changed between versions when using regex matching. An option |
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4 Important changes |
16.8 |
Upgraded Freemarker to 2.3.31. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.6.2 |
Fixed a bug in the auto-completion plugin where summaries were truncated to 1 character. This issue is fixed in the auto-completion plugin v2.0.2 |
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1 New and revised features |
16.6.2 |
The following plugins have been added: |
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1 New and revised features |
16.6.1 |
The following plugins have been added: |
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1 New and revised features |
16.6 |
The following plugins have been added:
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1 New and revised features |
16.6 |
Extended the plugin framework to support:
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1 New and revised features |
16.6 |
Release of the program finder and local government stencils. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.6 |
Extended the metadata scraper filter to support XML. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.6 |
Added support within the SXC for the management and editing of configuration, template and web resources using a WebDAV client. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.6 |
Added support for basic HTTP authentication with an API token when using the Funnelback APIs. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.6 |
Added support for result page thumbnails to be set from the administration and marketing dashboard. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.6 |
Improved WebDAV support for Windows Explorer and MacOS Finder. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.6 |
Improved the task scheduler listing screen to enable additional tasks to be scheduled. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.6 |
Added support for a custom HTTP header |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.6 |
Added support for auto-completion to be called on preview versions of results pages. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.6 |
Fixed a bug in the configuration/template files UI where in incorrectly reported that there were unpublished files. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.6 |
Fixed a bug in the raw configuration editor that prevented some configuration keys from being saved. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.6 |
Fixed a bug in the YouTube gatherer that was triggered by an empty playlist ID. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.6 |
Fixed a timeout issue that prevented data sources and search packages from being created correctly under certain conditions. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.6 |
Restored global domain redirects ( |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.6 |
Fixed a bug to enable search package and data source management API functions to work correctly with query processors which run in read-only mode. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.6 |
Fixed a bug preventing the publication of configuration files when using the perl file manager. |
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4 Important changes |
16.6 |
The following features have been deprecated:
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4 Important changes |
16.6 |
Added the following new permissions:
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4 Important changes |
16.6 |
Added or updated the following API calls Updated the following API calls to v2. These APIs now return additional username and password fields that can be used to authenticate (via HTTP basic authentication) with the Funnelback APIs. The corresponding v1 calls are now deprecated. v1 tokens will continue to work but require regeneration to use HTTP Basic Authentication.
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2 Minor improvements |
16.4 |
Improved the security of the download support package feature and enabled users of the SXC to access this function. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.4 |
Added administration screens for scheduling of data source and analytics updates. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.4 |
Added WCAG 2.1 support to accessibility auditor. The following checks have been added:
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2 Minor improvements |
16.4 |
The new workflow.publish_hook.batch allows for batching up configuration changes before publishing to query processors to reduce network load. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.4 |
Added an option to view the details of configuration keys when the system is running in read only mode. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.4 |
Increased the summary text limit (indexer option |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.4 |
Revised the top level structure of the documentation to make it easier for users to find relevant information. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.4 |
Added a new API for getting the licence usage of a client. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.4 |
Fixed a bug in the web crawler where base href tags were not processed correctly. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.4 |
Fixed a bug where instant updates would always include the start URLs. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.4 |
Fixed a bug where YouTube data sources could not be updated without a channel ID. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.4 |
Fixed an issue with the document title fixer filter that caused it to insert bad titles sourced from h1 and h2 tags. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.4 |
Fixed an issue where the faceted navigation editor screen became unresponsive when there were too many templates to check for legacy facets. |
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4 Important changes |
16.4 |
The push API no longer returns a HTTP 302 status code when SAML is enabled. A HTTP 401 status code will be returned to unauthenticated users. Users should authenticate using API tokens rather than directly when using a web browser. When using a web browser to access push API endpoints you should first authenticate using the admin API. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.2 |
Added a new upgrade utility to support the migration and upgrade of collections from Funnelback v15.24 to v16. Upgrading from Funnelback 15 and earlier into Funnelback 16 is complicated due to a number of architectural changes within Funnelback. The upgrade utility:
A detailed v15.24 to v16 migration guide is also provided. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.2 |
Added a new configuration file, |
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1 New and revised features |
16.2 |
Added various API calls to support the upgrade tool. |
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4 Important changes |
16.2 |
Collection scheduled updates times are not preserved when upgrading from 15.24 and earlier. These must be recreated for all the data sources by applying configuration keys to each data source. See: scheduling data source updates. In addition, if running and in-place upgrade (running the v16 installer in upgrade mode on an older Funnelback server) any pre-existing cron jobs for collection updates will need to be manually removed by editing the search user’s crontab. |
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4 Important changes |
16.2 |
Collection ID format change when upgrading from v15.24 There is a breaking change for collection IDs when upgrading from v15.24 and earlier. This will break existing integrations with Funnelback. System administrators can configure collection remapping using the |
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4 Important changes |
16.2 |
v15 default roles are assigned to a default client on upgrade from Funnelback 15. Default roles will be prefixed with the e.g. the v15 role |
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4 Important changes |
16.2 |
The Funnelback installer now automatically rebuilds indexes after an upgrade. In Funnelback 15, this was a step that had to be manually triggered when an administrator logged into Funnelback after an upgrade. As a result search indexes will be unavailable until the reindexing process is complete. |
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4 Important changes |
16.2 |
Upgrading to v16 may affect ranking on any collections which were not of the web or meta types due to the automatic wrapping of such collections in a meta collection/search-package. Explicitly setting |
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2108 |
Added support for Funnelback for higher education in the Squiz experience cloud. The v16 release of Funnelback for higher education includes a tool for performing an initial setup of the package.
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2108 |
Added an auto-completion plugin which generates structured auto-completion to be generated from an existing Funnelback index. The auto-completion plugin enables structured auto-completion to be generated by:
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2108 |
Added a new enhanced update task scheduler. The new update task scheduler enables updates to be configured by a search administrator with schedules based on time between updates, or scheduled at a fixed time.
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2108 |
Added the ability to log in to the administration dashboard using a simple user ID that omits the client ID. This enables login with an email addresses as the ID if it has been used for the username when setting up the account. See: creating administration users |
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2108 |
Added support for a global plugin to validate all content updates added to the files via the admin-api. An example use case for this is to provide virus scanning of content that is submitted via the administration interface (or via the API). |
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2108 |
Added a new screen to the administration dashboard for the management of client application tokens. A new user permission, |
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2108 |
Added a new API ( |
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2108 |
Added a new API ( |
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2108 |
Added a new API ( |
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2108 |
Added a new API ( |
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2108 |
Added a new API ( |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2108 |
Updated the push API ( |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2108 |
Search packages analytics updates are now automatically scheduled when they are created. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2108 |
Updated the |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2108 |
Added support for system administrators to define range restrictions on configuration keys with a duration type value. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2108 |
Fixed an issue with accessibility auditor that caused the user interface to break when the user’s web browser language was not set to English. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2108 |
Fixed an issue with the web crawler that caused it to ignore the |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2108 |
Fixed an issue with best bets where it failed to remove a search result that had the same URL as the best bet URL when the removing matching search result option was selected. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2108 |
Fixed an issue with the web crawler form interaction feature that caused it to incorrectly handle form parameters with empty values. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2108 |
Fixed an issue that caused invalid XML to be returned when the query contained a vertical tab character. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2108 |
Fixed an XXE vulnerability in cached documents that allowed files to be read from disk. |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2108 |
Updated the default configuration to enable accessibility auditor by default. Accessibility auditor can be disabled on a data source by setting the |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2108 |
The outliers (trend alerts) cron job is no longer able to be scheduled via the administration dashboard. A system administrator can update or delete this scheduled update by editing the search user’s crontab. |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2108 |
Legacy best bets (from v14.2 and earlier) have been removed.
The removal of legacy best bets has the following implications:
Any legacy best bets should be manually re-entered via the best bets editor located within the marketing dashboard. |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2108 |
Funnelback no longer supports additional administration service providers or single logout (SLO) when using SAML authentication. Existing SAML configurations and the Groovy permission mapper may need to be updated. See: the v15.24 to v16 migration guide. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2041 |
Added support for client API access tokens, which enabled applications and scripts to access the admin API using a token that is independent of specific administration users. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2041 |
Added warnings to the administration dashboard when license limits are exceeded. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2041 |
Improved the admin API’s JSON representation of timezone and other date/time related config settings. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2041 |
Introduced support for higher-performance zstd compression in push document storage. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2041 |
Improved presentation of errors from SAML user mapper scripts. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2041 |
Improved performance of administration dashboard pages showing large numbers of data sources. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2041 |
Improved administration dashboard messaging when Funnelback server is in read only mode. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2041 |
Eliminated the use of jsessionid cookies when using SAML authentication. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2041 |
Product documentation links now refer to the hosted documentation which can be updated when errors are identified. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2041 |
Added user interface for enabling plugins. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2041 |
Improved administration dashboard breadcrumbs in a number of areas. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2041 |
Added client application tokens, an improvement for application tokens, suitable for use on the Squiz Experience Cloud (SXC) |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2041 |
Added plugin servlet filter hooks, a replacement for custom servlet filter hooks, suitable for use on the Squiz Experience Cloud (SXC) |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2041 |
Fixed handling of missing originalQuery entries in search query history. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2041 |
Fixed preservation of URL parameters through the SAML login flow. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2041 |
Fixed broken funnelback_documentation search result template. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2041 |
Fixed support for access_restriction settings based on hostnames when Funnelback is deployed behind a load balancer. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2041 |
Fixed accessibility auditor to account for the removal of the legacy facet data model. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2041 |
Fixed display of default web collection file type restrictions. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2041 |
Fixed return key handling when adding web data source URLs. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2041 |
Fixed a number of cases of old 'collection' terminology usage within administration dashboard. |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2041 |
The legacy metaData section of the result data model has been removed. listMetadata should now be used instead. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2034 |
Introduced screens for managing plugins and enabling/disabling them on search packages and result pages. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2034 |
Added instant-update and push logs to data source log viewing and WebDAV. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2034 |
Analytics email settings are now configured in result page config instead of a dedicated file. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2034 |
Improved the performance of the tuning dataset administration dashboard when many entries are added. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2034 |
Added a message to the administration dashboard when the server is set to read-only mode. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2034 |
Simplified the search transaction data model by removing some deprecated sections. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2034 |
Fixed handling of profiles containing hyphens in the legacy perl CGI administration pages. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2034 |
Fixed handling of permissions within some areas of the administration dashboard to disable inaccessible options. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2034 |
Accounted for the new client ID requirement within LDAP authentication. |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2034 |
The removal of some data model elements to simplify its usage may cause some freemarker templates, plugins and hook scripts to fail when they reference the removed elements. These implementation components must be updated to work with this and future versions of Funnelback. Specific data model elements removed include:
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2032 |
New administration dashboard, terminology and client separation Funnelback’s administration dashboard has been overhauled to make search implementation easier. As part of this improvement, new terminology of search packages, data sources and results pages has been introduced. Broadly, search packages are equivalent to meta collections in earlier versions of Funnelback, and a search package is now required to bundle up the data sources and results pages used to deliver a search. Data sources are equivalent to non-meta collections in earlier versions (but without the ability to serve search results), while result pages are the new equivalent of profiles and are used to define the search results page functionality and formatting. The new administration dashboard also formalises the separation of implementations in a multi-tenant Funnelback environment with the concept of a client, which groups together all components of an implementation. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2032 |
Plugins for reusable custom code A new bundled format for custom code to be run on the Funnelback server, known as a plugin, has been introduced to the product. Plugins are intended to separate customisations from individual data sources and results pages so that they can be more easily reused and can go through a separate approval process to ensure quality in multi-tenant environments. Plugins provide similar capabilities to custom Groovy scripts in earlier versions and add the ability to supply some types of data, such as external metadata, dynamically during a data sources update to avoid the need to assume the internal file system layout. The features superceded by plugins - Groovy document and Jsoup filters, hook scripts, custom workflow and custom gatherers are no available and any existing implementations that are updated to Funnelback 16 must rewrite this custom code using the plugin framework. |
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1 New and revised features |
16.1.2032 |
The support for performing the following tasks via REST APIs has been introduced:
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2032 |
The |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2032 |
The individual data source components and associated relative weightings of data sources in search packages can now be set via the configuration APIs with the |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2032 |
Streamlined knowledge graph administration experience. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2032 |
Tuning runs are now subject to the same task queueing system as data source and analytics updates. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2032 |
Updates to the default template to support results page level configuration settings where possible. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2032 |
Added support for knowledge graph scripts at the results page level. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2032 |
The data source components of a search package can now be set within the configuration editing screens. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2032 |
A number of improvements to SAML authentication support, in particular reduction in the number of SAML service providers required for administration setups and to support integration with Auth0. |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2032 |
Added a Content-Type response header to the push API endpoint |
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2 Minor improvements |
16.1.2032 |
The 'Intercom' support tool has been integrated into the Funnelback administration dashboard. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2032 |
Prevented WebDAV clients which take long-timeout locks and do not reliably release them from locking out other clients. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2032 |
Fixed recommender operation on filecopy data sources. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2032 |
Fixed the all-results.json endpoint to handle when search sessions are enabled. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2032 |
Fixed presentation of sparklines within trend alerts reports. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2032 |
Fixed possible configuration setting loss when encrypting configuration values for the first time after installation. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2032 |
Prevented creation of users with service user prefixes. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2032 |
Fixed the web crawler to handle responses without a Content-Type header. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2032 |
Improved Padre handling of invalid XML characters. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2032 |
Fixed handling of ui.modern.pseudonymise_client_ips when Funnelback is used behind a proxy or load balancer. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2032 |
Fixed publication of web resources files containing spaces in their filenames. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2032 |
Fixed isAdminUI Freemarker macro when search and administration ports are the same. |
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3 Bug fixes |
16.1.2032 |
Fixed consistency of status codes resulted by the update history API. |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2032 |
Tuning is now a task under the task queue, this means when it runs can be controlled by the task picker. Tuning can no longer be started by |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2032 |
The task queue now allows running tasks to be added to the queue and allows multiple tasks which use the same resources (for example, the same data source), to be in the queue at the same time. |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2032 |
query_processor_options now supports configuration environments. |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2032 |
The meta.cfg config file no longer exists, being replaced by the meta.components search package configuration setting. |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2032 |
The groovy script specified by the auth.admin.saml.groovy-permission-mapper setting now supports defining roles the user is always permitted to edit. |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2032 |
The administration dashboard’s edit file-manager rules pages are no longer available. Any remaining cases where custom file manager rules are required must be set directly in the relevant .ini files. |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2032 |
Naming of log files has been made more consistent between data source types. For example, crawl.log is now named gather.log to be consistent across the product. |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2032 |
Local data sources are not supported in this version, reflecting the restriction on direct filesystem access in the AWS SaaS environment. Existing local collections should be converted to either a web or custom data sources depending on the logic implemented in the local collection. |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2032 |
Search package and data source IDs are now limited to 192 characters |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2032 |
Freemarker templates are now only able to import/include files which end in .ftl |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2032 |
The question.collection.configuration data model exposed to Freemarker no longer contains server (global) configuration settings. |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2032 |
The |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2032 |
SAML authentication now creates user .ini files representing logged in users to support cross-component authentication. |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2032 |
Added a |
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4 Important changes |
16.1.2032 |
Knowledge graph
|