Dalet Flex 2021.2.0 Release Notes

Dalet is excited to present the February 2021 release of Dalet Flex 2021.2.0.

This release of Dalet Flex provides the new features, quality and security enhancements, bug fixes, and other changes listed below.

Flex 2021.2 is an interim release track, allowing customers to make use of the latest functionality and bug fixes in Flex before the next LTS (Long Term Supported) release track becomes available. 

As an interim release track, it should be noted that this release: 

- will no longer receive any updates once the next LTS track (2021.5) is available.

SAML SP certificate update

When upgrading from an older release to 2021.2.0 or later, all customers using SAML will need their IdP configuration to be updated with the certificate of the new private key that's generated in and specific to their environment.

The documentation pages under here provide details of how to configure SAML for supported IdPs. The only change necessary is the certificate, which can be obtained from `https://{account}.{your-flex-deployment.com}/login/saml/metadata` and then needs to be reconfigured on the IdP side.

Once the IdP has been reconfigured to use Flex Login App's new certificate, then you need to refresh Login App’s caches of IdP metadata by either:

• disabling and then re-enabling the account, or:
• restarting all instances of the Flex Login App.

Handling of self-signed certificates for (on-premise) IdPs

When upgrading from an older release to 2021.2.0 or later, all customers using SAML whose IdP certificate is not signed by a widely recognised certificate authority – which usually applies only to on-premise IdPs – must ensure that this certificate is provided in a container volume mount to the Flex Login App via the custom_ca_certs mechanism.

Customers may previously have been mounting a custom SAML JKS keystore to the Flex Login App containers – this approach will no longer work.

Asset, UDO and Annotation metadata persistence in MySQL is no longer supported

Asset, UDO and Annotation metadata has been persisted in Arango by default since the 2020.4.0 release. Until now, this could have been overridden by specifying the
flex-enterprise.featureToggles.metadataArangoUsage KV to false.

From 2021.2.0 onwards, this KV is no longer supported and should be removed. Any customers who have been continuing to persist their Asset, UDO and Annotation metadata in MySQL must perform the necessary migration to ArangoDB as part of the upgrade.

Removed support for legacy collections

The legacy Collections functionality that supported the legacy MAM was deprecated when the legacy MAM went EoL after the 2020.6.x release series.

As part of this release, we are formally removing the support for legacy collections from Flex. For this reason, when upgrading from an older release to 2021.2.0 or later, all customers will need to remove any legacy collections that may exist in the system, before performing the upgrade.

Please verify the use of collections from a single API call to the master account API /collections endpoint. https://flexapi.ooyala.com/flex71_rest_api/index.html#collections_get

If in doubt, customers should correspond with their local support/EM team in order to determine whether or not they have any legacy collections existent in their system.

At present there is no support for publishing the new Collections model.

Job listings are not filtered by workspace

The Jobs listing page in the Enterprise Admin UI will no longer use the active workspace to filter the jobs shown in the results table.

oEmbed API in FlexB2C

oEmbed is a standard media embedding protocol that allows content consumers such as CMS systems or websites to embed external content via a standard API interface. FlexB2C shall now exposes endpoints that implement oEmbed standard to allow players embedding in any consumer site or application that can handle oEmbed payloads. See for more https://oembed.com/

Launch workflow nodes provide links to navigate directly to the sub-workflow

Launch Workflow actions in the workflow graph in the Flex Enterprise UI now provide a link to allow the user to naviagate directly to the launched workflow. This reduces the effort needed to examine the execution state of complex workflows that use sub-workflows extensively.

FSP Chunked Transcoding

The Flex Stream Processor is able to perform chunked transcoding where a transcode is split into a number of parts that are processed by multiple FSP instances. When all parts have been transcoded the final output is created by combining all the parts into a single file. This feature will allow for rapid transcode of material that would take a long time if a single FSP instance is used.

Note: Transcode plugins do not currently support chunked transcoding, this will be added in a future release.

Known Issues

An indexing issue prevent new media not to appear in the MAM interface after import. As a result it is not recommended to upgrade existing deployments to Flex 2021.2.0.

FlexMAM

Admin App

• Account Theme - Users can now upload a JPEG or PNG to customise their logo and icon.
• Admin users are now able to set a default for the table in the search listing, temporal metadata and tile metadata within FlexMAM.

Enhancements

• '*' and '?' Can now be used in FlexMAM searches for wildcarding in text queries.
• Users can now define a time in/out for marker templates.
• ‘Owner’ has been renamed to ‘Created by’ in preparation for future changes in the system.

Fixed issues

• Fixed an issue where an error occurs when creating/editing/managing marker templates.
• Fixed an issue where, after upgrading to 2020.12, opening tasks would fail.
• Fixed an issue where clicking the ‘Save’ button twice in the collection metadata tab returns an error.

Known issues

• Pin icon does not appear for a child UDO in the search listing.
• While bulk editing metadata, values of complex child variables are overwritten instead of merged.
• Spaces are replaced by ‘+’ in filename when assets are downloaded.
• Shared tile templates cannot be edited by another user.
• Video asset proxy does not play when technical metadata is extracted to a file.
• When switching or reloading assets in marker view on the marker summary panel, the marker filter types intermittently don't load.