Announcing the Kendo UI Q3 2012 Service Pack

Over the last few months, we’ve been working hard to deliver you an awesome Q1 2013 release (which you can read more about, here). Along the way, we figured today was time to drop a Service Pack for Q3 2012, which includes a bunch of new features and a boatload of fixes. In this blog post, I’ll highlight a few of things we’ve added in this release. To download the Service Pack right away, head over to the downloads page of your account. This post won’t cover everything new and improved, so to read more, be sure to check out the change logs:

• What’s New in Kendo UI Web
• What’s New in Kendo UI DataViz
• What’s New in Kendo UI Mobile

The Kendo UI Q3 2012 service pack provides a number of updates, fixes, and enhancements to the version of Kendo UI we shipped in November of 2012. From a high-level perspective, we accomplished a great deal of work for this latest milestone:

• 76 bugs fixed
• 19 enhancements added
• 48 issues resolved for Kendo UI Web
• 8 issues resolved for Kendo UI DataViz
• 20 issues resolved for Kendo UI Mobile
• and much more!

Here are just a few of the cooler fixes and enhancements we’ve implemented in this service pack:

New! Check for changes in the DataSource

With this Service Pack, we added the ability to call hasChanges() on the Kendo DataSource, which returns true if the underlying data has changed since the last read.

var ds = new kendo.data.DataSource({
schema: {
    model: { id: "id" }
},
data: [{ id: 1, name: "Burke" }]
});
ds.read();

output.innerText = ds.hasChanges() // Returns false
ds.get(1).set("name", "Brandon"); // Change some data
output.innerText = ds.hasChanges(); // Returns true

New! Support for canceling the requestStart event

Another addition we recently made to the DataSource is the ability to cancel the requestStart event of the DataSource by calling e.preventDefault() this can be useful in cases where you want to prevent a refresh on the DataSource under certain conditions, as illustrated in this completely contrived example:

var ds = new kendo.data.DataSource({
    data: [{name: "Brandon"}, {name: "Burke"},
           {name: "Derick"}, {name: "Todd"}],
    requestStart: function(e) {
        if (dontRead.checked) { // Don't refresh if checked
            output.innerText = "Read Canceled";
            e.preventDefault(); // Cancel the refresh
        }
    }
});

ds.read();

New! Editor Link dialog now supports localization

With the Service Pack, we’ve added three new additional properties to the Editor messages options literal that allow you to control the input labels on the link dialog. So, if I wanted to localize the labels in another language, say Urdu, I could add the following options to my editor initialization:

$("#editor").kendoEditor({
    messages: {
        linkWebAddress: "ویب ایڈریس",
        linkText: "متن",
        linkToolTip: "اوزاری ٹوٹکا"
    }
});

Then, when a user clicks on the Link button, the dialog labels are now localized, as shown in the following image.

New! Additional widget configuration options for MVC Wrappers users.

We added a lot of new features in this quarter that will be of particular interest to our MVC Wrappers customers. These include support for deferring widget initialization scripts outside of the widget wrapper, the ability to specify aggregate member names on the grid, a configuration builder for setting column filter options on the grid, and series highlight configuration options on DataViz charts. Be sure to check out the Demos and you SP bits to try these features out.

New! Additional DataViz demos, features and enhancements In addition to adding some additional demos to our recently-release Stock Chart widget, we’ve also added some new features to DataViz charts and gauges, including series highlight configuration options, the addition of selectStart, select and selectEnd events on charts and additional data attributes for radial and linear gauges.

New! PopOver open event handler provides target element data.

In addition to a number of fixes we added to Kendo UI Mobile, we’ve added target element information to the PopOver open event, which returns the DOM element that the user clicked on to open the PopOver widget:

popOver = $('#popOver').data("kendoMobilePopOver");
popOver.bind("open", function(e) {
  console.log("Opened by: " + e.target[0]);
});

There’s a lot more great stuff in the Service Pack, so head on over to the the downloads page in your account and get the bits now!

What’s next (and an announcement)

While you digest everything new in the Service Pack, we’ll keep on working on the Q1 2013 release, which you’ll get to see more of as we approach the next two milestones:

• Kendo UI Q1 2013 Beta, expected in late February
• Kendo UI Q1 2013 Release, expected in Mid-March

We’ve already talked about a lot of what’s coming in the Q1 release, but we’ve also got a few surprises up our sleeves. Today, I’m happy to share one of these with you….

The Q1 2013 release of Kendo UI will include support for TypeScript!

As many of you know, TypeScript is a compile-to-js maintained by Microsoft. The language is still very-much in an Alpha state, but we’ve gotten so much demand from our customers, that we decided to start offering support (in the form of TypeScript definition files for Kendo UI ) sooner, rather than later. If you’re a TypeScript fan-boy or -girl, keep an eye out for those in the Beta timeframe.

These are just a few of the updates, fixes, and enhancements that you’ll find in the service pack for the Kendo UI Q3 2012 release. Many of the bugs and feature requests we implemented came directly from you; our customers. We spend a great deal of time tracking your feedback on our forums, our UserVoice site, Stack Overflow, Twitter (@KendoUI) and elsewhere online. As always, we welcome all feedback. Please continue to submit your requests. We’ll continue to make Kendo UI more awesome.