Issues with CMS 3.x layouts breaking, SQL filters etc

1

Good day,

I recently upgraded my CMS to 4.0.6. It went smoothly, but I noticed some issues on the Displays.

  1. The Flipper Clock that I had on my screen changed to a good old analogue clock.
  2. I upgraded the displays to the 4.x versions, to match the CMS version. However the displays crashed after 30 seconds and continued to crash. The CMS reported that there was “No Data” and that “There are no valid widgets inside one of the regions in this layout”, which seemed to be the reason for the crash of the player.
  3. I suspected that one of the layouts was an issue, even though it had been working perfectly until my upgrade to 4.x of the CMS.
  4. In the offending layout, I changed the analogue clock widget to a Flipper Clock. I needed to resize the region as it was displaying a blank region. Once I clicked on the region the Flip Clock reappeared in the Layout Editor. This did not fix the crashing player.
  5. I have a Dataset for each of my 4 areas that contains the Starting Time, the Ending Time, the Subject of the Exam and the Group writing the exam. I used the SQL Advanced Filter Clause to display the exams that are being written in each of the 4 areas in a region on the display. I used the filter NOW() > examstart AND NOW() < examend. That seems to be broken. and only displays the text set for when there is no data, namely “CLOSED”
  6. I decided to cut my losses and recreate my layout from scratch. And I encountered the following issues:
    a. You cannot set an image as a background. (You could change the background in 3.x) You can insert an image and set it to fill the screen, but it reports again that “Global Element has empty Data”
    b. You can insert a String in a DataSet Region and define the Dataset that you are using. However there is no way you can define what to display when there is no data. In the old CMS that would be under Appearence Tab and down the bottom under “No data message”
    c. I am guessing that the underlying CMS functions have changed to such an extent that they break old layouts. There isn’t very much in the way of tutorials and step by step help to help users transition.
2

i have also often problems with layouts after an (major or minor) update, my solution is to open and rebuild it.

3

I had to rebuild my server and return to 3.x (including the players) My players were crashing every 30 seconds and filling the server logs.

Apparently they were supposed to be restoring the missing functions. (HTML Editor so you can add what to display when there is no data.)

Xibo really screwed up badly with this version.