Unplugged 2.1

Launched today is the new 2.1 version of Unplugged (downloadable from your favorite app store/market). The official release notes can be found here and while there are a few significant bug fixes there are a couple of notable added features:

Unplugged can now sync Rich Text Fields. This is obviously a huge benefit as there are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of apps out there with this field type included. Many mobile frameworks, including the Mobile Controls Project, do not currently support natives RTF’s (the workaround is to use Multi-line edit boxes) but with Unplugged you can drag in a Rich Text Control, bind it to your source and voila! It’s rendered on your device.

Another read-only feature is Attachment support. We started on this in the last version but now the engine is more efficient in sending attachments to the device and allows the context switching between the Attachment viewed in the embedded browser and back to the Unplugged application running. Again, exciting things are happening here at Teamstudio and this logically leads to us to now work on bi-direction replication of attachments (hint: adding camera support so photos can be syncing as document attachments).

To view attachments in you mobile applications simply use the standard methods of opening or linking to attachments as you would in any XPage. For example, to display a link to one attachment in a document use (for more, slide in a Repeat Control):

<xp:link escape="true" id="link1"

      rendered="#{javascript:!docRequest.getAttachmentList('FileAttachments').isEmpty();}"

text="Attachment">

<xp:this.value><![CDATA[#{javascript:getDbPath() + "/0/" + docRequest.getDocument().getUniversalID() + "/$file/" + docRequest.getAttachmentList('FileAttachments').get(0).getName()}]]>

</xp:this.value>

</xp:link>

We have also completely rewritten the way Unplugged handles international characters, ensuring that all characters in the Unicode character set can now be accurately stored and synced.

Another major feature of the release is the Unplugged Reference Implementation. This is a desktop version of Unplugged that lets you develop and test mobile applications without a device. As Unplugged does not support all the XPages controls and functions and as developers, we know how hard it is to currently debug XPages, (especially SSJS – ugh!), this should help you determine how your mobile apps will run on Unplugged if, say, comparing to a mobile web version. Installing and using this Desktop Application is further detailed on page 24 of the updated Unplugged User Guide (included in the download).