Release Notes: January 2022

Welcome to the January 2022 update to Transposit, with new actions and connectors, the first release of conditions in runbooks, long-running actions, a stopwatch for your activities, new endpoints for attaching/detaching Slack channels, and performance & usability enhancements.

New Actions and Connectors

New actions have been developed for:

New connectors are now available for Atlassian and Shortcut.

The new connector to Atlassian can help you use Slack to support your service desk. Have you considered enabling your staff or users to raise requests for access to Atlassian through Slack? Transposit can act as the orchestrator in these kinds of scenarios. Requests can be raised in Slack, with Transposit creating the related issues in Jira and the approver approving them through Slack, ending with Transposit creating the user in Atlassian and generating an audit trail that provides a complete record of each step in the process.

Conditions

In a runbook, in addition to running an action or setting an activity field, you can now define conditions. When you add a new condition in an action chain, you can create rules around different sets of data and then run your actions based on those conditions, forking off to alternative actions based on the resolution of your conditions.

For details on conditions, see the new Adding Action Conditions topic in the Runbook documentation.

Long-Running Actions

Before this functionality, the Developer Platform limited operations to a runtime of a minute before they would time out, though they could be extended to 5 minutes. It was difficult to put together actions for polling or for restarting a cluster and waiting for healthy return messages.

Now you can add long-running functionality to an action and have it run indefinitely by scheduling potentially endless continuations. This functionality gives you periods of time to work with which you can set and, in that period of time, you can wait indefinitely for a response or start another continuation. After the action has run to your satisfaction, you can run workflow.log.done to end the action.

For developer information on long-running actions, see the new Long-Running Actions section in the Action Concepts & Best Practices documentation.

Activity Time

Every activity now has a stopwatch that starts running when the activity is created, with the clock shown above the activity, stopping when you close the activity. The start and end times can be edited, so that you can adjust the times where they don’t accurately reflect the activity’s current state.

Validation is built in so that, for example, the start time can’t be put after the end time. If you have a very long running activity that moves into days, the display adjusts automatically to show days instead of hours, and a browser picker is included to change the day and time.

Slack Client Attach/Detach

New endpoints have been introduced for attaching and detaching Slack channels to and from activities. As before, you still have a checkbox to automatically create a Slack channel when you create an activity.

However, now you can build the new attach/detach functionality into your actions to allow activities to be detached from one Slack channel and attached to another. This can be helpful when you have a single on-call channel in Slack and you later want to peel some priority accounts off to their own dedicated channels.

Other Enhancements

  • Performance fixes, indicators, and pagination improving load time of runbook lists.
  • Enhanced visibility of error messages in runbooks.
  • New Developer Platform support for action output parameters.
  • Simplified starter application templates in the Developer Platform.
  • Forked Developer Platform application defaults to team ownership.