Release Version 2.5

Release date: 27 December 2018.

Distribution

Source snapshots are attached to this announcement and the git tag filesender-2.5 contains the base that these snapshots were created from.

Installation

Documentation is available at http://docs.filesender.org/v2.0/install/

Upgrade Notes

Version 2.x breaks compatibility with version 1.x. We recommend a fresh installation to version 2.x of FileSender.

Major changes since 2.4

The addition of new optional aggregate statistics. These do not contain information that can identify any specific user but instead contain information about the overall statistics for given periods of time such as the mean or maximum file size for a given time period.

Time periods are in the range from 15 minutes, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly etc. Statistics are gathered for each interval that is active. So for example if it is currently 10:30am then at 11:00 the hour interval will change to the one for the 11-12 hour on the same day.

When enabled, graphs for aggregate statistics can be seen by accessing the link at the bottom of the about page. To enable aggregate statistics set aggregate_statlog_lifetime to true. Access is also restricted in the config with the can_view_aggregate_statistics setting which has the same format as the admin config and allows you to select which users can see aggregate statistics.

There is support for exporting aggregate statistics and emailing them periodically. This is disabled by default because aggregate_statlog_send_report_days has a setting of zero by default. This can be enabled with the aggregate_statlog_send_report_days and aggregate_statlog_send_report_email_address config settings. The information which is emailed comes from the AggregateStatisticMetadata and AggregateStatistic tables which do not contain any information which can identify individual users.

generateUID() has been updated through PR 190.

Interesting Information about source code changes:

To support aggregate statistics new upsert support code was added to FileSender. An upsert (update or insert) allows an insert or update to happen as a single atomic operation. This avoids the need for transactions to help perform the same task and allows multiple clients to upsert at the same time without creating issues around many clients trying to insert because an initial update had failed.

Storing constants in the database is now supported by new code in classes/data/constants contains a new DBConstant class that supports storing ID-string number to string mappings in the database. This extends to mirroring the mapping in PHP so that tables can store constants broken out into tables and reference the strings using their corresponding ID numbers. Having DBConstant subclasses allows the PHP code to reference ID numbers without needing to query the database to find out their current values. The mapping should be identical in PHP and the database for these constant tables. Database migration is supported to add these tables and also extend then with new values should the need arise. Note that you should not delete constants from these tables or the PHP code.

Configuration changes

aggregate_statlog_lifetime defaults to false to disable these statistics. Set this to true to capture stats.

aggregate_statlog_send_report_days defaults to 0 to disable this report by default. Set this to the number of days between reports.

aggregate_statlog_send_report_email_address is set to '' by default. Set this to the email address you wish to send the aggregate statistics to.

Support and Feedback

See Support and Mailinglists and Feature requests.

A new label "release2.5" has been created to specifically track issues relating to this release. Please attach that label when reporting issues that relate to this beta. Current known issues can be seen at https://github.com/filesender/filesender/labels/release2.5