Business Rules, PDF Editing and More in Rollbase 4.4

The latest release of Rollbase introduces new upgrades to help you build powerful apps faster, including no-code decision services with Corticon.

The new V4.4 release of Rollbase is here, and we have lots of updates and UI improvements that we're excited to share with you . V4.3 had a number of firsts for a low-code platform, and a few months later, we have raised the bar even higher:

• Rollbase is now the first platform with no-code decision services
• Rollbase is now the first platform with a built-in PDF annotation and signing capabilities

Additionally, we have added many additional features, among them smart images.

Decision Service & Business Rules Integration with Corticon

V4.4 provides application designers with a no-code decision services solution thanks to a new decision service mapper tool and out of the box integration with Progress Corticon.

Corticon is a solution to create business rules using spreadsheet-style modeling tools, which allows users to manage both simple and very complex rules without having to code. The no-code and low-code aspects of both Rollbase and Corticon enable users to be extremely agile, creating even more sophisticated apps in record breaking time, and speeding up application delivery and maintenance to speeds never seen before.

This feature's key element is an innovative visual decision service invoker tool. The tool contains a mapper that lets you specify what data to pass to the decision service and how to pass the results back to the Rollbase objects, all without coding :-).

Here is a screenshot: 

Please check out this post where we go into more details on how it all works.

PDF Annotations

Companies that digitally transform themselves minimize paper use. A lot of documents are scanned and then require annotations, review and signing. As Rollbase is a leading platform in the digital transformation space, providing a no-code solution for PDF annotations and signing is a big step forward to help companies move in that direction. We are excited to announce the new PDF editing capabilities directly from the end user browser. This feature can be enabled on a field by field basis and be controlled by Rollbase permissions and roles.

In this release, we have introduced a specific feature set:

• Add, move and delete pages
• Append from existing PDF file
• Annotate and highlighting
• Insert a signature

Smart Images

The platform will now serve images dynamically tailored to the request so that we optimize:

1. The mobile data consumed while still providing quality image resolution
2. The rendering speed of lists of objects containing images (grids or cards)
3. The space consumed in Cloud storage

Now Grids or cards containers with images, object views and image carousels finish rendering extremely quickly.

Also, we have changed how limits are specified: instead of specifying a max total image size in megabytes, application designers can specify the max width (for landscape image) or max height (for portrait image) in pixels. Independently of the size of the photos taken by the end user's device, the application designer is guaranteed that the image can be uploaded without the end user converting, and does not have to worry about storage over consumption.

For example, in a travel application I can specify uploaded images—no matter what their size—will be stored with a max width of 2400px On another application that does not require high resolution images, I can set it to 1200px (the setting is actually on a per image basis, providing maximum flexibility). The benefit is that end users can upload images from any mobile device independently of their resolutions.

Build Powerful Applications Faster

We excited about the latest new features and will continue to innovate and transform the platform. We are adding services we think you'll find very valuable and many of them are complete no-code services. The huge set of services allows you to build applications faster and more reliably than ever and lets you focus on your business problems. Check out the full list of what's new here.

We will have more exciting features in next release. If you are interested, please check our early access program on eap.rollbase.com (if you don’t have an account please comment below, or send me a note).