The existing Newsroom feature was extended to all iTop back-office users. It was previously limited to iTop administrators and to external News providers, such as iTop Hub

Since this version, iTop is a News provider, which means he can send News to targeted users, when something is occurring in iTop.

This uses the existing Trigger-Action mechanism. A new type of Action Notification allows to send News, instead or in parallel to eMails.

1. The news message are displayed to the targeted iTop users, within iTop back-office, under the bell icon.
2. A red bullet on the bell, informs the user that he has unread News. This is refreshed only if the user navigates in iTop.
3. When a user click on one of their News, it opens the url specified in the action, in general the object which has triggered the News. And the news is automatically flagged as read with a date.

A user can retrieve all received news, and work on them, one by one or in bulk:

• He can flag them as being read or not
• He can delete them
• News, read or not are automatically deleted for all users after an itop configurable delay, 60 days by default.

Those News notifications can only be sent to iTop Users having access to the iTop backoffice

Back-office users can now unsubscribe themself to a particular notification

What we call a notification here, is the combination of a particular Trigger and Action

• For example: an administrator may have configured
  • a trigger on log update to notify by email and by news the agent
  • and another trigger on location creation, to notify by news some people.
• In such case, the agent will be able to
  • Choose between email and news for the first trigger, he might even unsubscribe to all, if allowed by the trigger.
  • Unsubscribe to the News on the Location creation trigger, if it is useless for him

Limitations The person who configured the trigger and action can limit the possibility for users to unsubscribe:

• For OnMention triggers, we usually want to deny users to unsubscribe from all channels, they will have to keep at least one, so we are sure that they are notified.
• On some action such as iCalendar Invitation, Unauthenticated Form,… users are not allowed to unsubscribe at all.
• Users can unsubscribe only to notification action for which they have already received at least one notification event.
• Users can only unsubscribed to action which are sent directly to their Contact Person linked to their User, such as Email and News, so not to a Rocket, Teams,… and other notification channels of this nature.

iTop is using an external provider tool, called CKEditor, which had to be upgraded for maintenance and security reason. The new version being quite different that the previous one, most edition possibilities are preserved with different icons, a few were lost and new one were added.

The new html editor toolbar

Retrieving previous features in the new toolbar

This new version of the editor is much more powerful than the previous one to format tables, but as any new version, it takes a bit of time to get used to it.

• How do I exit a portion of embedded code? Press 3 times the “Enter” key
• When you copy paste a piece of a previous caselog, into the new caselog, the background color remains and it's tricky to remove it. To avoid this, use the key combination: Ctrl+Maj+V to paste only the raw text and not the formatting. It's possible to remove the background color, if you are familiar with HTML: click on the button Source and edit the HTML code directly and remove the div tags.

To ensure iTop’s accessibility, our team has been working on new back-office themes. WCAG compliants, those UI focus on making it easier for users with visual impairments to use the solution:

• Color blind theme : Designed to help users with colorblindness, this theme actually breaks down in two sub-themes to adapt to specific cases:
  • One adapted to protanopia and deuteranopia
  • And another one for tritanopia
• High-contrast theme : Increased contrast to allow users an easier distinction between different elements on screen. It can be helpful for users with different pathology from colorblindness to low vision issues.

High-contrast	Adapted to Protanopia & Deuteranopia

Combodo and editors of iTop extensions can now decide to display to some Users, in general the Administrators, but it can be all users as well, some messages related to the new version.

• There can be multiple messages at the first user connection after an iTop upgrade
• Those messages once acknowledge by the user are no more displayed
• In iTop 3.2, four messages are displayed to all Users and one message is targeted to iTop Administrators only

Behavior of the buttons

• Remind me later: will present you all messages again, next time you connect to iTop
• Next: will acknowledge the current message as read and display the next one (or close the window if it was the last one)
• A click outside of the pop-up window, will close the window and next time you connect to iTop, the messages that you have not acknowledged will be displayed again

A search brick was added by default on the End User Portal, to allow them to retrieve a Ticket amongst their tickets regardless of their status.

On any iTop object displayed in the console, its class label, displayed in the header part, is clickable for iTop administrator and jump to the datamodel page for this particular class.

Multiple improvements were made around notifications. The main one are listed below:

This version brings a new action to notify back-office users through News displayed in iTop.

• This action can be triggered by any trigger.
• Out of the box, Notification by News actions are automatically created, check here for details:
  • One for sending a News to any Person who was mentioned on any iTop object ( iTop retrieves any existing Trigger (on mention) and link them to the new Action)
  • One for notifying the Agent of a Ticket, but this one is not linked to any trigger, it's just an example.
• The triggering of this action generates one News per recipient person having an associated active user

Most actions propose a new Asynchronous field to specify if it must be triggered immediately and block the user as long as not completed, or be executed in background or follow the global iTop setting

Triggers can now define if users are allowed to unsubscribe from all communication channels, all but one or none, by default it Allow complete unsubscription

Better changing it for triggers such as on object mention and when an approval is requested

A new ajax tab (displayed asynchronously, as dashboard attributes) is added in the Action objects : Last executions.

It will display the logs for this specific Action. By default it will display 61 days, but this can be changed using the notifications.last_executions_days configuration parameter.

In order to make a clearer difference between the Action which specify how a particular action must be performed and the Event which represent the result of an action execution, we have renamed most classes under Action and Event.

With the 3.2.0, some events have been added and some were removed

Removed

• EVENT_DB_BEFORE_APPLY_STIMULUS
• EVENT_DB_AFTER_APPLY_STIMULUS
• EVENT_DB_APPLY_STIMULUS_FAILED

Added

• EVENT_DB_ABOUT_TO_DELETE: Deletion is confirmed and will occur. Object and its relationships are still available in DB for OQL query and Get('att_code'))
• EVENT_ENUM_TRANSITIONS: Manage the allowed transitions in current object state. The only action allowed is to deny transitions with $this→DenyTransition($sTransitionCode)

From iTop 3.2.1, AttributeDateTime and AttributeDate uses the <default_value> XML tag to prefill the field and to set it during PHP direct object creation.

• NOW() → the current date (time) when the object is created
• DATE_ADD(NOW(), INTERVAL 7 DAY) → the current date (time) + 7 days
• or any OQL supported syntax to compute a date

Those default values can be set on an older version of iTop and will just have no effect.

Allows (through an extension or snippet) to specify extra files and directories to be added in the iTop backup archive along with standard files (conf. file, DB dump, …).

Example

class MyFilesToAddToBackupArchive implements \iBackupExtraFilesExtension
{
        public function GetExtraFilesRelPaths(): array
        {
                return [
                        // A file saved in the data folder
                        'data/file1.txt',
                        // A file saved in a module in the current environment ("production" most of the time)
                        'env-'.\utils::GetCurrentEnvironment().'/some-module/file2.txt',
                        // A file from the log folder
                        'log/file3.txt',
                ];
        }
}

Allows (through an extension or snippet) to display messages to users in a popup that log in the backoffice. Messages will be displayed on each log in until the user acknowledge the messages.

To provide your messages, extend the \AbstractWelcomePopupExtension class (which implements \iWelcomePopupExtension with default methods implementations) and return your messages in the GetMessages() method .

Example

use AbstractWelcomePopupExtension;
use utils;
use Combodo\iTop\Application\WelcomePopup\MessageFactory;
 
class MyTestProvider extends AbstractWelcomePopupExtension
{
        /**
         * @inheritDoc
         */
        public function GetMessages(): array
        {
                return [
                        // Message with title and description on the left, illustration on the right
                        MessageFactory::MakeForLeftTextsRightIllustration(
                                // Unique ID of the message within the provider
                                "fake_id_01",
                                // Title of the message
                                "Example 1",
                                // Description of the message, can contain HTML
                                "Some text to be displayed",
                                // Absolute URI to the illustration
                                utils::GetAbsoluteUrlAppRoot() . "images/illustrations/undraw_relaunch_day.svg"
                        ),
 
                        // Message with illustration on the left, title and description on the right
                        MessageFactory::MakeForLeftIllustrationRightTexts(
                                "fake_id_02",
                                "Example 2",
                                "Some text to be displayed, but on the right",
                                utils::GetAbsoluteUrlAppRoot() . "images/illustrations/undraw_relaunch_day.svg"
                        ),
 
                        // Message with complete HTML description
                        MessageFactory::MakeForLeftTextsRightIllustration(
                                "fake_id_03",
                                "Example 3",
                                <<<HTML
                                        <div>
                                                <p>Some content for the message</p>
                                                <p>Some other content for the message</p>
                                        </div>
HTML,
                                utils::GetAbsoluteUrlAppRoot() . "images/illustrations/undraw_relaunch_day.svg"
                        ),
 
                        // Message with an embeded video
                        MessageFactory::MakeForLeftTextsRightIllustration(
                                "fake_id_03",
                                "HTML with YouTube video",
                                <<<HTML
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GCUdV7tHmEA?si=T6tcJFqobQ0TxLgo&amp;start=16" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
HTML
                        ),
                ];
        }
}