Upcoming changes with 2024 R2

Jan Mauersberger

As usual, each upcoming release will bring a few improvements, fixes and changes for scripting, reporting and generally customization. With this article I would like to teaser a bit what’s coming.

Rhino JavaScript Engine Update

We at last managed to upgrade to a new platform version, including JDK 17 and with that a newer version of our beloved Rhino engine. We were stuck for years on version 1.7.5 from last decade (2015). Now we moved to version 1.7.10 – still not the latest but we are at least moving. That upgrade comes with a price: some features are not working as before for example Array.concat() got broken for some reasons. I suggest checking your scripts with the beta version and use a polyfill in case you are affected. In addition, the pragma ENHANCED_JAVA_ACCESS is not supported anymore by the engine. We had to workaround it and all test cases for script libraries we posted so far seems to work but downloading the latest versions may be required.

Script File Handling

The file handling changed completely with the introduction of the medini collaboration server in 2023 R2.1. There is a good read in the forum from Nils. That change basically implied that many well-known features got lost, as they all were working on files and not on documents. Now with 2024 R2 we try to bring back some of the beloved features. You again should be able to move script documents around, or even manipulate on file system and then synchronize them with the model browser. Also, the possibility to create a symbolic link in the navigator to a script location outside the project and then sync should work.

API Changes

There are as usually changes to the scripting API but not too many. You can create a Stopwatch object at any time using Google’s Guava Stopwatch for example to measure execution time in scripts. The modification of internal object identifiers as medini identifier is forbidden for all scripts from now on.

M2Doc Reporting

Two changes are noteworthy for m2doc report designers. With 2024 R2 it finally should be possible to access FMEA and FMEDA metrics with parameters. In addition the general purpose eval() service is now (1) applicable to any type of object, so also non EMF/Medini object and (2) accepts up to 5 parameters which can be used in the evaluation script. With that is should be possible to at least script anything that is missing for the report.

Final and more information will be available in the final documentation.

Happy Scripting
Jan

Jan Mauersberger

I forgot to mention one small but maybe important detail: 24.2 will not have an internal, embedded JavaScript editor on board anymore. Main reason is that the eclipse project that has developed and still is developing that editor has done dramatic changes, e.g. introduced a node.js internal language server and that alike. We were not able to adapt to all changes, resp. were hesitating to get all implications on board.

So we decided to drop internal JS editing but rely on better and more and more often used external editors as VIsual Studio Code. I stringly suggest to get hands on that tool and start editing JS with code.