Dear customers,

There is a lot of work happening behind the scenes which isn’t visible from the outside. Play SQL is not currently idle and since the current piece of work takes a bit of time, here’s an update.

In Play SQL Spreadsheets, you can visualize data both through their original container, the Spreadsheet, and through a custom report that you can build, the Query. Spreadsheets have nice input features and Queries support gathering data from several tables. Up until now there has always been a major limitation for Queries: They couldn’t use the renderers of Spreadsheets.

The major change in Play SQL 2.8 is to merge the features of Queries and Spreadsheets. It should be seamless to customers since the storage format doesn’t change. Among other advantages, users will note:

• For Queries, several renderers will be available, such as “Link”, “Currency”, “Page Picker”…
• Knowing that the first two columns of spreadsheets are ID and POSITION, those columns were hidden in queries. Users can now choose to display or hide them.
• User Parameters can be displayed as a form in the page view.
• The full table can be displayed when printing.

This internal change is also a massive improvement for internal development, for example it’s easier to develop pagination in a future release.

Minimum system requirements

We note that 75% of our customers use Confluence 5.4 to 5.6.4. We also notice our software upgrades only benefit to customers with the most recent versions of Confluence, since they are the ones who regularly upgrade their software packages. Most of those who use an old version of Confluence also keep an old version of Play SQL. Of course, if you need a security fix for an older version of Play SQL, please contact the support.

In any case it would be unfair to penalize new features in order to maintain compatibility for versions of Confluence which are more than a year old.  We’ll also upgrade the requirement for Java: Java 6 is end-of-life by Oracle since Feb 2013 and it isn’t supported by Atlassian anymore. In summary:

• Java 7 will be required for Play SQL 2.8 because it is supported by Atlassian,
• Confluence 5.3+ will be the minimum required for Play SQL 2.8, since we rely on the User Rename feature.