What's new in Episerver Social 1.4?

Episerver Social 1.4 releases this week. Below you'll find the highlights of what's new in this release. (For an individual breakdown of changes, check out the release notes.)

Enhanced expression library

Episerver Social emphasizes the ability to model your social content to meet the needs of your application. Supporting that flexibility, the Episerver Social framework allows you to define completely custom filters for your content using its expression library. With the release of version 1.4, the library of expressions has grown to include two new ones.

ContainsExpression
Apply the ContainsExpression to contruct a filter matching content where a collection field (an array, list, etc.) contains a specific value.

Consider an example where I wish to match Comments, which have been extended to include an accompanying Tags array, by a specific tag value. I can construct a correponding filter using the ContainsExpression as demonstrated below.

var containsSportsTag = FilterExpressionBuilder<MyCommentExtension>.Field(d => d.Tags).Contains("sports");

OrExpression 
The framework, which previously included the ability to logically AND filters together, now also includes the ability to logically OR your filters.

Consider an example where I wish to match Comments, which have been extended to include an accompanying LuckyNumber field, by those that equal 2 or 7. I can construct a corresponding filter using the OrExpression as demonstrated below.

var luckyNumberField = FilterExpressionBuilder<MyCommentExtension>.Field(d => d.LuckyNumber);
var luckyNumberOf2Or7 = FilterExpressionBuilder<MyCommentExtension>.Or(
    luckyNumberField.EqualTo(2),
    luckyNumberField.EqualTo(7)
);

These expressions, like the others in the library, can be applied in all of the Episerver Social features. (You can find a full overview of filtering by extension fields in the developer guide.)

Sorting by mean

Episerver Social's Ratings feature automatically tabulates statistics for ratings that have been contributed. We're focused on progressively enhancing this feature over the coming months. In this release, a Mean property has been introduced on the RatingStatistics model. Additionally, statistical data can now be sorted by the mean value in either ascending or descending order.

Performance enhancements for filtering

We're perpetually focused on improving performance within the platform. Among the more prominent performance enhancements in this release are improvements in the filtering of your extension data.

Authentication troubleshooting

A failure to authenticate with Episerver Social is unlikely if your application is configured with the appropriate credentials. However, there are times when environmental factors (such as firewalls or proxies) might interfere, preventing your application from connecting with Episerver Social. Such scenarios may result in unexpected behavior. With that in mind, the SocialAuthenticationException has been enhanced with supplementary information to aid in the troubleshooting of your situation.