(Breaking) Changes in v6

[ansibleguy76]

Breaking is a big word, but I have been heavily rewriting the backend and frontend, and I honestly couldn't test ALL the functionalities by myself, so together with some betatester volunteers, we tried our best to test all functionalities

BACKEND CHANGES

• dropped Babel and converted all code to plain ESM with export default and import. This means the code doesn't have to be built anymore, makes life easier and dev faster. In your volume map of docker-compose you'll need to fix your functions/custom.js file from require to import, or the app will break ! => that's both ways, if you would change the custom.js (i assume btw very few use it) and revert back to previous version, it will break as well.
• jump to node 20.
• bumped ALL packages to latest => this broke OIDC (currently not working in v6 due to breaking updates), but I have no testing capabilities for the moment.
• rewrote the docker file with node20-alpine, python is now with venv (new alpine requirement)
• the server code does not require compiling anymore, and for backward compatibility I have left it under /app/dist, but my IT brain wants it in /app (That will eventually happen)
• new v2 api, where I'm slowly rewriting the api's with better best practices (let's say my api writing skills on v1 were still novice)
• Also the form parsing has been rewritten, hopefully a lot faster. Forms are validated individually, so making a mistake in 1 form will not "crash" ansible forms anymore. However a bad yaml forms.yaml will still break, I can't load roles and perform authentication without it.
• the current forms.yaml used to be the only config file, but grew to forms folder with multiple yaml files. That made it messy and complex. The way forward is to split categories, roles & constants to a new file (e.g. af_config.yaml). For now it's still forms.yaml but you'll start seeing deprecation warnings that will ask you to remove "forms from the base forms.yaml" (i know it sounds silly), but read it as "you should move your forms away from af_config.yaml to the /forms folder", that makes more sense. The forms.yaml will eventually be renamed.
• If move azuread & oidc to the a new oauth2 table, so more authentication providers can be added in the future without having to add new tables
• the database schema is now created ONLY from the backend. The docker-compose projects have dropped the init db part, this makes it a bit easier for k8s deployments.

FRONTEND CHANGES

• I also moved the frontend (for now still on vue2) from webpack to vite
• this allowed me to jump to node 20
• frontend is completely rewritten in vue3. If bugs related to this pop up, I'll give these priority to new features.
• v6 will is now with bootstrap 5.3 and with themes that can be changed easily (just haven't written the docs to do that yet)

FUNCTIONALITY CHANGES

• datetime fields output is slightly changed
• query-type was deprecated a long time ago and is now removed (enum instead)

VERSION CHANGES

• no more beta version, but more proper names like latest-rc and 6.0.1rc

[JamesHutchinsonHV]

Do you have plans to move to vue3? This tool is great but with its dependency on vue2 I'm having problems getting it approved for us.

[ansibleguy76]

yes already working on it.
most of the work was done. but then i paused a while and all the new features and fixes need to be reapplied to the new version. bootstrap will be the new css framework with options to make your own themes.

[ansibleguy76]

v6 is in beta !