EASA is faster than ever before!

EASA 5.5 brings Authors and Users more insight and control over an EASAP's operational performance.

• Profile a running EASAP's ACTION's.
• Watch state changes in a running EASAP's objects.
• Use the new CONTROL CALCULATION to delay heavy processing until a later time.
• Preload published EASAP's for faster startup, load balancer redirects to pre-loaded EASAP.
• 'Partial' CELL REFRESH refreshes groups of objects and their dependents from Excel.
• An EASAP now initializes Excel in a parallel thread for faster startup.
• Range Reference: overrides Default: loading default values from Excel for input objects.
• Specific EASAP's can be pre-cached on the EASAP Server for faster startup.
• RANGE REFERENCE's and NAMED RANGE's values are cached from Excel at Publish time.
• A faster EXPORT TO PDF creates a PDF from a minimal copy of the spreadsheet.
• INPUTBOX supports EU and US number formats via a global setting in MENU ACTION
• A GUI object accepts an object reference to dynamically assign CSS style in Style: or Label Style:
• DATA TABLE may use a LIST object reference to give row-level control of CSS style.

An EASAP's ACTION's and ACTION GROUP's can be examined during a test run on the page:

• EASA→Authoring→Testing→Analyze EASAP→Profile

Start-to-finish times and counts for all the ACTION's and ACTION GROUP's in an EASAP are visible and sorted from slowest to fastest. Profile gives the Author immediate insight into a performance bottleneck.

The re-sizable Profile panel occupies the lower portion of the EASAP interface (See Test and Analyse).

The state of data and GUI object's in the EASAP Tree can now be 'watched' during a test run from the page:

• EASA→Authoring→Testing→Analyze EASAP→Watch

'Forward' and 'Backward' links allow the Author to investigate an object's state and the state of any dependent objects on the Tree quickly and efficiently. The Author can discover the exact origin in the processing chain when there is a discrepancy between an expected value and observed value in an EASAP.

The re-sizable Watch panel occupies the lower portion of the EASAP interface (See Test and Analyse).

Additional control over EASAP processing is given in the new object: CONTROL CALCULATION.

CONTROL CALCULATION allows an EASAP to temporarily suspend the dynamic updating of the EASAP's objects and related Excel cells in order to gain a more responsive interface.

Three levels of control are available:

• Excel Calculation
• Excel Connection
• EASAP Calculation

When Excel Calculation is disabled, Excel macro's and functions are not run and dependent cells are not updated until it is enabled again. This Excel feature is now available from within an EASAP and provides the very same delayed-calculation control.

With Excel Connection disabled, a User may sequencially modify multiple data fields and then push these values to their corresponding Excel fields at a later time. The common use for this is an EASAP where a remote Excel Server causes slowness from frequent cell updates. When cell updates can be done in batches there is lower connection overhead and Excel becomes more responsive.

EASAP Calculation suspends any propagation of state changes for all objects in an EASAP. In an EASAP with complex processing, a User may enter data into a number of fields without having to wait after each one. Processing is suspended until some later point in time when the data is committed into the EASAP and processing to update object state proceeds within the EASAP.

Published EASAP's can be pre-loaded to create a more immediate user experience.

EASAP startup times have come down to a fraction of their prior values. Many EASAP's load in one-half or one-third of their prior startup time, though speed-up varies by EASAP.

The EASA Server's load balancer will re-direct the User to the particular EASAP Server where the selected EASAP has been preloaded.

To configure preloading, see Preloading an EASAP.

CELL REFRESH may be manually configured by the Author to refresh only the Excel-linked objects specified in Objects: and their dependents.

Additionally, a TABBED PANE or a SUB PANE is allowed in Objects: in which case any of its Child objects in the GUI from the Tree will be refreshed from Excel.

Finally, CELL REFRESH now allows EXCEL WRITE ACTION's, and the affected dependent cells are refreshed as well.

The GUI objects listed below accept literal strings as well as object references for dynamic CSS style formatting. The updated parameters are:

• Input Style:→input portion
• Style:→entire visible field of the object

• DATEBOX
• INPUTBOX
• INTEGERBOX
• LOGICBOX
• REALBOX
• TEXTBOX
• TEXTAREA
• CHOICE LIST
• FILE CHOICE

In parallel with 'dynamic CSS style' for the single valued GUI objects above, now each INPUTBOX in an INPUTBOX LIST may have its own CSS style attribute.

This will dynamically override any default settings or inherited CSS style settings.

A LIST reference may be entered in the paramter:

• INPUTBOX LIST→ Row Style from DOR:

Where the elements of that LIST each contain CSS style attributes corresponding to each INPUTBOX in the INPUTBOX LIST. See INPUTBOX LIST for the main reference as well as an example.