Changes for version 0.018.0 - 2026-10-28
- Enhancements
- Cross-row columns: cs=<col>:<fn>:<alias>[:<arg>] with by= and order= adds a running total, moving average, rank, z-score or share of the total per row. A Cross-row panel builds them; charts and exports carry the new column.
- Canvas cards can carry their own cross-row plan (cross_row), replacing the page's, run on the card's own filtered rows. Add current view collects several columns; the card header's Edit cross-row edits the plan as chips and warns when a rename affects a plotted column. PATCH /api/analyses/:id/visuals/:visual replaces a card's plan.
- Word cloud (GET /wordcloud, and canvas cards with kind=wordcloud), drawn with HTML::TagCloud. Each word links to its rows, or on a canvas cross-filters to them.
- Relative time ranges: ?range=<name>&rcol=<column> on every data route and saved canvas (last_24_hours, today, yesterday, last_7_days, last_30_days, last_90_days, this_month, last_month, this_quarter, last_quarter, this_year, last_year). An unknown name or missing rcol= is a 400. The dashboard filter bar and canvas toolbar have a Time range menu.
- The filter UI adapts to the column's detected type: date pickers, numeric operators, or string operators.
- New "between" filter operator (col:between:YYYY-MM-DD:YYYY-MM-DD); lt/le/gt/ge compare ISO dates as dates.
- New measures for the pivot, column statistics and canvas cards: median, stdev, first, last, range and p<N> percentiles.
- Time buckets: span= groups a chart or pivot by hour, day, week, month, quarter or year; /graph?agg= plots one point per bucket.
- Stored time patterns accept time=, e.g. 27/10/2026 14:05.
- bi-alert: --suppress, --recovery (exit 3), --notify-cmd, and several analyses and thresholds in one run.
- Response compression, ETag/304 and HTML minification via Mojolicious::Plugin::Buffer (new prerequisite); downloads opt out.
- Optional page cache: page_cache_dir and page_cache_duration store /catalog and /tutorial in a CHI File cache.
- Internal: every data route's filter stage is one function, _reduce_records.
- Main navigation links to Canvases, Catalog and Open file on every page.
- Chart, pivot, stats and insights pages show a "Drawn from:" strip naming the time range, filters, cross-row columns, combined files and de-duplication, with a link back to change them.
- Every page has a full breadcrumb, from Home to the page itself, each step named after what it shows: Home > sales > Bar chart: amount by region > sales (region = East) > Pie chart: Count by region. The trail is read from each page's back links, so it is no longer cut at two levels; a file opened from the browser sits under its folder, and a canvas is named. Back links to another site are not followed, and the trail is at most eight steps.
- Bug Fixes
- Two charts on one canvas no longer collide; the second card draws.
- A card's cross-row column no longer appears in the cards beside it.
- A card naming a column no plan produces is refused, instead of printing a heading over empty cells.
- A day bound on a timestamp column (e.g. le 2026-10-27) now includes the rows stamped on that day.
- A stale ?dd= bookmark no longer makes canvas marks unfocusable.
- Canvas help now describes what the page actually does.
- Charts, pivots, stats and insights of a combined (c=), de-duplicated (d=1) or inner/outer-joined (jtype=) view now draw from the rows the table shows; before, the panels dropped those parameters, and d=1 was ignored by every chart route. Export keeps jtype= too.
- Opening any toolbar panel closes all the others: the histogram panel left Cross-row and Word cloud open, and Merge, Combine and Export left chart panels open and their own buttons disabled.
- The Word cloud, Cross-row and Ask toolbar buttons are styled like the others; all of them now share one btn-tool class.
- Toolbar and filter-bar controls on the same row now line up top and bottom: they share one height and are centred, rather than aligned on their text baselines.
- The pivot panel's Limit to top, ranked by, Time bucket and "of column" fields are the same size as its Row, Column and Measure fields.
- Canvas controls line up: the Time range bar, parameter bar and toolbar share the table toolbar's height, the Time range menus and Apply button are styled, and card-header buttons are one height.
- Every dropdown and text field is white with one border colour, from a single rule in the layout; the table page's filter bar and pivot fields showed the browser's grey, and pivot fields turned near-black when the OS was in dark mode.
- An unknown canvas (/a/<id>) is an HTML page with the breadcrumb and navigation, not a line of plain text.
- Folder view levels keep the link back to the table they came from, and its crumb is an absolute link.
- A missing page is a 404 with the breadcrumb and navigation, not Mojolicious's bare page. /view/<table> for a table that does not exist is now a 404 naming it, rather than the home page with an error that showed the data directory.
- A view that is both joined (j=) and combined (c=) shows both, from /join or /combine: /combine ignored j=, and Merge after Combine dropped c=. The table now shows the rows its charts draw from.
- Tests: the read-only model_dir and export-write-failure tests skip where chmod cannot revoke access (Cygwin, Windows ACLs, root), using Test::Permissions; they failed on Cygwin (CPAN Testers). Fixes https://www.cpantesters.org/cpan/report/b2c11820-d297-11f1-a488-efeb21b3859a
- Tests: t/unit.t no longer segfaults at exit under Devel::Cover on perl 5.42 (the CI coverage step); its LLM-response helper was a lexical "my sub".
- Text::CSV is a prerequisite: script/bi-alert's fallback reader needed it and it was not declared.
- Documentation: cross-row columns (cs=, by=, order=), compression and the page cache (page_cache_dir, page_cache_duration), breadcrumbs and 404 pages, j= with c= on /join and /combine, and an API SPECIFICATION for every public function. Util.pm's licence now matches the distribution's (GPL2). Fixed POD that rendered "= >" and "&>".
- The templates and controller comments are ASCII again.
Documentation
Modules
Web-based Business Intelligence viewer for data files
Natural language to analysis spec
Safe recursive-descent expression evaluator for Database::BI
Home picker, filesystem browser, table viewer, left-join engine, result filter, export, and file upload
SQLite materialisation cache for Database::BI
Automatic statistical insights for Database::BI (Phase 5.2)
Table-agnostic adapter around Database::Abstraction
Resolve a location column to coordinates, once per distinct value
Narrative summary generation for an analysis result
the chapters of the in-application tutorial
Shared utility functions for Database::BI modules