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DaDaBIK 9 Monterosso is here

Posted by Eugenio on 5 Jul 2018

Dear all,
I am very glad to announce that DaDaBIK 9 Monterosso is finally available!

Here (https://youtu.be/d4h3Dui46B8) you can watch a release video, containing an introduction to the new features.

You can buy your license here.

After “Lerici”, "Monterosso" is another wonderful small town on the Italian coast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monterosso_al_Mare, one of the five villages in “Cinque Terre”.

DaDaBIK 9 Enterprise, for just 7 days (until July 12th) WILL BE ON SALE AT €95 instead of €160. In bundle, you will find two ready-to-use applications: Dada Sales and Dada HelpDesk (see later for details).

As usual, if you are in your free upgrade timeframe, you can request your free copy from the upgrade page. If you have a DaDaBIK ENTERPRISE license and you are out of your free upgrade timeframe, you can also get DaDaBIK 9.0 by purchasing a maintenance license (€65). Even in this case, you can do everything from the upgrade page.

Our on-line demo page has been updated and two new demos are available (an Help desk application and a Contact form application).?

WHAT’S NEW IN DADABIK 9?

First, there are some important news about the installation process.

You can build a DaDaBIK app starting from an Excel file
It is now possible to build a DaDaBIK app starting from an Excel, CSV or ODS file: you just need to upload the file and DaDaBIK will create the relevant database tables and build an application over them!

Prepackaged apps
You can now create a DaDaBIK app package: it’s a folder containing a manifest.json file (that describes the app) and all the relevant files (custom functions, SQL scripts, custom images, .... ); any DaDaBIK owner can install your app just by copying the package into the new apps folder and choosing the app during the installation process.

Bundled prepackaged apps
DaDaBIK Enterprise/Platinum comes with two bundled prepackaged apps: Dada sales (a sales management application) and Dada HelpDesk (a HelpDesk application. It can be used within a company to manage, for example, the IT help requests). You can install them directly from the installation procedure. At the moment, they are only available for MySQL.

Apart from these changes in the installation process, for DaDaBIK 9 I tried to focus my efforts on the needs of power users, trying to build a proper Rapid Application Development platform.

I have noticed many times that power users at some point tend to work on the DaDaBIK code because they need features which are not (built-in) available or because they just want to add something to the layout. My idea was to make this process as easy and clean as possible, I wanted to allow developers to:

  1. adapt DaDaBIK to their (sometimes complicated) workflows
  2. Introduce their custom code without touching the DaDaBIK core code, therefore preventing problems during upgrades: are you familiar with the "I don't upgrade DaDaBIK because I made too many changes to the code" fear? :)

Here are, therefore, the other improvements you will find in DaDaBIK 9:

Custom buttons
You can now add personalized buttons to your application, specifying for each button a callback PHP or Javascript function to execute. Buttons can be placed in several positions (e.g. on each row of a results grid, on the top of an edit form or near to a form field) and can execute a Javascript function or a PHP function, even via AJAX.

Dashboards
It is now possible to embed a graphic report or a tabular report into a custom page; when logged in as an admin, you can get the embed code by clicking on "show embed code" at the bottom of a graphic report. By embedding one or more reports into a custom page you can easily create a dashboard.

Granular permissions for “CSV Export” and Custom pages

Easier layout customization with layout hooks
With layout hooks you can add custom HTML or PHP code in some parts of the layout without modifying the DaDaBIK core code and therefore making future upgrades easier. There are 13 layout points (including, for example: page header, page footer, edit form header, edit form footer, ...) where you can add layout hooks.

It is now possible to make part of your DaDaBIK application public and part login-protected
This can be useful in several cases, for example if you want to allow unauthenticated users to read a public dataset or if you want to open to the public a registration form or a contact form.

It is now possible, for each field, to specify a custom JavaScript function to execute when an event (e.g. onfocus, onblur, onclick, ...) occurs. For example, you can write a simple JavaScript function that capitalizes the content of a text field when the user leaves the input field (“onblur” event).

There are other new features (including record copy and multiple inserts) and a list of bug fixes (including a huge reduction of memory usage for most of the functionalities and the fix of a problem with select_single and select_single_radio, which could change the selected values unexpectedly). As usual, you can find the complete list in the changelog page.

IONCUBE ENCRYPTION

Please note that part of the DaDaBIK code is now encrypted with Ioncube. Maybe some of you won’t like this, but after having thought a lot about it, I think it is the only proper way for us to protect our intellectual property and to check if customers respect the terms of the license.

Let me highlight some important aspects about this change:

  1. Not all the code is encrypted, the idea is to keep unencrypted the code that users typically want to modify (functions build_results_table, build_details, build_form, header, footer)
  2. Considering the improvements introduced with DaDaBIK 9, it’s very unlikely that you need to modify the core code: you probably can do everything using hooks, custom buttons, custom functions, custom languages and custom pages.
  3. Finally, for users who modified the DaDaBIK core code, I will be glad, if possible, to give some advice about how to migrate their changes to DaDaBIK 9.



To run a PHP application that uses ionCube secured files you need the free ionCube loader. Ioncube is now very popular and the loaders are now installed by default by many hosting services, so in many cases you don’t need to do anything; in some other cases, you have to install it and finally there are also some providers that could prevent the installation of PHP extensions such as ionCube loader (but they are a small minority).

Among the hosting providers that have the ionCube loaders already installed we suggest, as a cheap solution, A2HOSTING, which offers a good shared hosting service at about 4 euros / month, 100% compatible with DaDaBIK (we tested it).

Enjoy! :)


Best,

Eugenio Tacchini
DaDaBIK founder

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