Optimisations & v3.3.4
Sam Webster
Software Developer
In this release we really focused on optimising what already exists - fixing many bugs and making things faster and easier to use, making your operations more efficient. We also added more options to the course completion certificate, made it easier to renew expirations, and added an FAQ.
Optimisations & Feedback
As V3 grows and matures we know it’s important to not only release new features but to also stabilise & optimise the existing features. We know how much of a pain bugs are, getting the dreaded “Server 500 Error”. We also hear you, that while some things may technically work, they aren’t very easy or efficient to use.
Your feedback is very important to the development process and enables us to get the crosshairs on problems accurately & fast. So from the developers, thank you. We sincerely appreciate your help as we continue to further the system, and we hope each release brings improvements to your operations.
Renewing Expirations
It’s now easier for administrators to renew expirations from either the Expirations page or the dashboard widget. Simply set the next expiry and hit “Renew”. You can also see a history of when the expiration was updated for audit & compliance purposes.
More Certificate Options
There are now more options to choose from when generating a course completion certificate for a student. With the addition of versioning to the Manual of Standards a few releases back, you can now select which training packages to generate the certificate against, which can be very helpful if you are trying to generate certificates for students who completed their training before the MoS was updated.
By default all are selected, but you can cherry-pick the ones that apply if required. You can also choose a “force pass” option, which will force the generation of a passing certificate. This should, of course, be used only when required. The action will be permanently logged for compliance purposes. However, sometimes this may be necessary and the missing performance criteria can be manually signed once printed, or at your discretion. This may be handy, for example, if the student completed them as part of a recognition of prior learning, or another course.
Bug Fixes
We patched over 17 bugs this release, many of which have been diligently reported by you and your teams. The release notes in the radar have the full details, but in summary, we focused on bugs related to the finance system, learning management system and aircraft maintenance. Here is a list of the bugs fixed in this release:
- A bug where the completed lesson progress bar would count all lessons (including repeats), not distinct lessons.
- A bug where custom training packages could break qualification editing due to same competency codes.
- A bug where a product wasn't returning the correct variation value pricing.
- A bug which would show the unit standard instead of the lesson standard in student records.
- A bug where lesson records would not always save.
- A bug where dispatch checks were checking for MEAI for dual multi flights not CLR MEA.
- A bug where having no access level assigned to a role could stop viewing documents.
- A bug where the dispatch checks would include private flights in flight & duty checks.
- A bug where searching for an apostrophe would break searching on some data tables.
- A bug where the lesson order was not always retained when editing the lesson matrix.
- A bug where a new product variation needed to be saved first before adding pricing.
- A bug where the validity of the daily inspection was only comparing against UTC not Local.
- A bug where automations wouldn't run when "set customers" was "never".
- A bug where the scheduler could stop working due to a deleted person.
- A bug where inactive tasks would show in the widget and dropdown.
- A bug where PIC logbooks wouldn't always save during flight return.
- A bug when trying to view maintenance for some aircraft.
Enhancements
We made a number of changes to make things smoother and easier to use, reducing the friction sometimes required to perform certain actions. These included making lesson records easier to fill out by setting many of the fields to a default value, making it faster to complete. Here is a list of the things we changed in this release:
- When completing a lesson record for the first time, student landings, crosswind speed and UPRT time are all defaulted to zero.
- When adding a lesson record, the end date of the event(s) will also bump up to match the start date.
- Restricted retrospective finance automations to running within 60 days, or earlier with a defined date.
- Competencies to display in better alphabetical order.
- Made it easier to delete a lesson record.
Wrap Up
We hope this release brings more stability and ease of use to the platform. An FAQ was also added which can be found on the sidebar under “Help”, and we will continue to add to this over time in an effort to continue keeping you all in the loop with what’s happening. We also expanded the Launchpad idea voting period to 4 weeks and revisited many to re-open voting, so check them out! Until next time!