Version 6.69 Build 266, November 9, 2009

This page documents all new features, enhancements and bug fixes included in this release of Pacific Timesheet. For information on changes made in previous versions of Pacific Timesheet, please see the release notes archive.

1. Custom Report Templates Now Stored in Database

Report templates are generated when you create a custom report. Previously these were stored on disk, which made backing up your system a two-part affair: you needed to back up both the database and the report templates. Now report templates are saved in the database, so only the database needs to be backed up. This also makes it easier to move Pacific Timesheet to a new computer, as only the database needs to be retained. Note that report templates are text/xml files and do not take up appreciable database storage unless you have many hundreds of custom reports.

2. Bill Rates, Pay Rates Now Can Be Imported/Exported

If your bill or pay rates depend primarily on the employee, you can now import/export them from the menu above the employee list on the Employees tab. Both the default rates as well as the exception rates are imported/exported.

3. New Employee Details Report Columns

The Employee Details report now shows employee permission levels and policies by adding the "Permission Level.name" and "Policy.name" columns.

4. New Timesheet and Leave Request Status Filters

When listing timesheets and leave requests on the Timesheets, Approvals or Leave Requests tabs, you can now choose from two new status filters: "Approved (All Levels)" and "Approved (Any Level)". This applies only if you have multiple approval levels enabled (System > General page). Previously there was just the "Approved" status filter, which behaved the same as the new "Approved (All Levels)" status filter.

5. Unapproving Leave Requests Now Removes Leave From Timesheet

This applies to employee policies that are set to automatically put approved leave request hours onto the timesheet (see the System > Policies > Schedule Rules page). In previous versions, if you approved a leave request it would then place the hours onto the employee's timesheet. If you subsequently unapproved, rejected or deleted the request the hours would remain on the timesheet. This version will automatically remove the leave hours from the timesheet if they were placed there by the request approval process.

6. More Reliable Database Connections After Database Server Restart

In some cases Pacific Timesheet would hold onto database connections that should have expired after the database server was restarted. This would result in odd errors, which would require restarting the Pacific Timesheet service to correct the problem. A new tag in timesheet-config.xml has been added to test and expire such stale database connections more reliably. If you are experiencing this issue you can set the <dbtest> property to true, e.g. <dbtest>true</dbtest>. timesheet-config.xml is in the <installdir>/tomcat/webapps/timesheet/WEB-INF directory, and any changes to this file require the Pacific Timesheet service be restarted for the change to take effect.

7. Employee Search: Spaces in Name Issue

When searching for employees with spaces in the name, for example a last name of "De Vore", previous versions would return no matches. This issue is fixed in this release.

8. Custom Time Periods Issue

Fixed an issue in which custom time periods could have a single date defined, rather than the minimum two time periods needed to create a time period.

9. Leave Requests Now Account For Holidays When Adding Hours to Timesheets

Suppose an employee made a leave request, for example Vacation, that spanned one or more company holidays. In previous releases, when the request was approved the entire vacation was pushed onto the timesheet without taking into account any holidays. This release will correctly account for any holidays first, adding vacation hours only for non-holiday days.

10. Annual Accrual Issue With Employees in Different Time Zones

An issue was fixed in which the wrong number of years an employee was employed was used when computing annual accruals. This only affected employees in time zones earlier than the default time zone (for example, if the default time zone is Eastern, then employees in the Pacific time zone would be affected). If you are using annual accruals, have employees in more than one time zone, and have set up accrual rates based on the number of years employed, then you should update to this release.

11. Fixed Timesheet Print/PDF Issue

Fixed an issue in which some timesheets, when the Print view button was clicked, generated a "Null Pointer Error".

12. Fixed Employee Password Autofill Issue

The password field in the employee properties page could be automatically filled in by some browsers. This would make it difficult to save changes to the employee profile because the two password fields would then not match. This release suppresses the browser's password autofill on the employee properties page to prevent this problem.