Visual Query Enhancements + .net Standard 2 in 2sxc 13

Visual Query has some awesome enhancements in 2sxc 13. + we upgraded to .net Standard 2.

Setting Always Visible and Print-View

Every Data-Source in the Visual-Query can have many settings, but these were only visible when you clicked on the details. Now in v13, you can activate them to show all the time - which is also great for print-screns, questions and tutorials:

Note that you can choose if you want to activate this setting or prefer the compact view, and once you save the query, the setting is preserved for this query. 

Improved Stream-Renaming

Renaming a stream used to need a lot of guess-work because you had to know what streams were available on a DataSource. Now Visual Query will show a dialog to offer you all the possible names reported by that DataSource. 

Note that this requires you to run the query once so the backend can tell the front-end what streams are available. In advanced cases you can also specify a stream-name manually. 

New DataSources

We've worked hard to make it easier to work with data-relationships and Metadata. For this, we created new DataSources such as:

1. Children - Get all the children of the current items, or all the children in specific fields/relationships
2. Parents - Get all the parents of the current items, or all the parents in specific fields/relationships
3. Metadata - will get all the Metadata of an item
4. MetadataFor - will get the target if the data is Metadata for something
5. MergeStream was enhanced to allow various kinds of Joins like XOR, AND, OR and Distinct

Upgrade to .net Standard 2 - even for Dnn 7.4.2

2sxc started using Dependency Injection in 2017 and showed that we could mix .net Core code with .net Framework and just get it to work. At that time, the .net standard which matched Dnn 7.4.2 was .net Standard 1.6, which forced us to use a fairly old Dependency Injection as well as an old Entity Framework. 

But all modern servers today now have newer .net Frameworks installed, and Dnn 9.4+ actually requires .net Standard 2, so we decided to see if we could also get this to run on Dnn 7 - and it worked!

So this is really important: 2sxc 13 will use .net Standard 2 and much newer Dependency Injection / Entity Frameworks than before. 

We're really happy with this change and believe this will provide another big boost in terms of future-proofing Dnn. 

To Be Released in a few days...

We're working super-hard to get 2sxc v13 out before the holidays, so stay tuned.

Love from Switzerland and Croatia
iJungleboy, PagnoDunadan and TVatavuk