Changelog

With the 2.12 release we have included some improvements to the Device Editor experience.

For Devices running with Node-RED 4.0.x and newer, there should be significant performance improvements when loading the editor, especially when the device is on a slow network link.

With the 2.12.0 release the correct HTTP Headers can now be set to allow Dashboards hosted in Node-RED Instances on FlowFuse to be embedded into other pages as iFrames.

This option is under the Instance Settings on the Editor section.

Enabled iFrame Support

This feature will require the latest Stack version, you will be prompted to upgrade if required.

Upgrade Stack to Enable

Team-level views of all Pipelines and Bill of Materials have been added to provide a complete overview.

The Bill of Materials view shows which components and their versions across all Node-RED Devices & Instances in the whole Team rather than at an Application level.

Team BOM view

Similarly the Team Pipeline view shows all CI delivery pipelines in all the Applications in the Team, giving team members a quicker way to jump to a specific Pipeline.

Team Pipelines

A new search bar has been added that makes it quick and easy to find resources within your team.

This expands on the search available on the Applications summary view - but by moving to the top header, it's now available on all pages.

For this release, it searches your Applications, Instances and Devices. We'll be expanding its coverage in future iterations to include other resources in the team.

Screenshot of the team-wide search

Having recently added our very own MQTT Service to the platform, we're continuing to expand on the features and tools we provide to help teams build their solutions.

We have added a view that shows you what MQTT topics are being used on the Team Broker. This helps give you clarity on the structure of your topic-space, whether you're using the MQTT Broker for a unified namespace (UNS) or any other use case.

This is a small iteration of the feature but we'll have lots more to come.

Screenshot of the UI to explore your MQTT topic hierarchy

In FlowFuse V2.11, we have updated the Audit Log views to let you see more of the events happening within your team. Previously, the Audit Log view would only show you top-level events happening to the application or team. With this release, it now provides an aggregated view of all of your resources. Additionally, each row contains an icon and name of the item raised the event that you can click to navigate straight to it making your workflow more streamlined.

Screenshot showing Audit Log with hierarchical events

We hope this feature will help you better understand and navigate your FlowFuse applications.

The FlowFuse Device Agent is the piece of software we provide to manage Node-RED instances running anywhere outside of the FlowFuse platform.

Today we have released the latest version of the agent that now requires at least Node.js 18 to run. To reflect this change, we are releasing this as a new major version - 3.0.

We recognise that software update lifecycles can be a challenge in some environments. This is why we've held off dropping support for older Node.js versions for as long as we could. However, we have to balance that against ensuring we continue to keep the Device Agent up to date with the latest security fixes.

If your devices cannot be updated to the latest Node.js versions, then please ensure you stay on the 2.x release of the Device Agent until a time that you are able to update Node.js.

Details for upgrading to this release are available in the documentation.

Instances can now make use of the new Timeline feature, providing a concise, chronological view of key activities within your Node-RED instance.

The Timeline tracks important events such as pipeline stage deployments, snapshot restorations, flow deployments, snapshot creations, and updates to instance settings, offering clear insight into when and what changes have been made.

The Timeline and Snapshots are now grouped together under the Version History tab, simplifying the navigation of your instance's history.

This feature is only available to Enterprise license and Cloud Team users. Note that the Timeline can only be accessed at the instance level.

Screenshot showing the new version history timeline

Screenshot showing the relocated snapshot page under the version history tab

To celebrate 25 years since the first release of the MQTT Specification we are happy announce a new MQTT Broker Service as part of FlowFuse Cloud.

The initial deployment is available to Enterprise Teams and allows up to 20 clients to connect to the broker. Each team has their own independent topic space and can set their own topic ACLs to control what clients can access.

From today, this feature is available to FlowFuse Cloud Enterprise Teams. We'll be bringing it to Self-Hosted customers in the near future, as well as adding the ability to purchase additional packs of clients.

See the broker documentation for more details.

We have added the ability to set Environment Variables on a Device Group. This allows you to set common values that all member devices can make use of.

Screenshot showing Device Group Environment Variables

We hope this feature will make it easier to manage your devices and keep your configuration in one place.

See the Device Group documentation for more information on how to set environment variables for your device groups.

We have added the ability to select which components of a snapshot you want to keep when downloading or uploading a snapshot.

The options available are:

• Flows: Include the flows of the snapshot
• Credentials: Include the credentials of the snapshots flows
• Environment Variables
  • Keys and Values: Include the keys and values of the environment variables
  • Keys Only: Include only the keys of the environment variables

Screenshot showing snapshot download component options

Screenshot showing snapshot upload component options

This feature can help you be specific about what you want to include in a downloaded snapshot. This is especially useful when you want to share a snapshot with others, but don't want to include sensitive information like credentials. Also, when you receive a snapshot that needs importing into a different FlowFuse platform or team, you can can now be selective about what to keep and what to exclude.

See the Snapshots documentation for more information.

We have now added the ability to manage notifications in bulk. This allows users to select more than one notification so that they can be marked as read, or marked as unread, all in one go.

We hope this small improvement saves you bundle of clicks and streamlines your operations.

Starting with the v2.9.0 release FlowFuse a new Application Dependencies tab will be available for Enterprise self-hosted and Enterprise Tier FlowFuse Cloud users where a complete list of dependencies belonging to every Instance associated to the application can be found.

The intent is to give users a birds eye view of an application's dependencies and track dependency changes.

Users can search by package name, version, instance or device name.

Users of FlowFuse Cloud can now make use of an enhanced navigation tool and visibility selector when using the static file service feature.

By settings the visibility of a folder to 'public', their Node-RED instance will automatically make any files in that folder publicly available - on a path of the user's choosing.

This makes it very simple to serve up additional assets such as images or libraries that can be used in your Node-RED Dashboards.

The visibility settings apply to the folder; you cannot make individual files public. Any changes to the visibility settings will require the instance to be restarted for the changes to take effect.

In the v2.8.0 release we have updated the LDAP SSO feature to allow group membership to be managed by LDAP groups.

#  Configuring

Building on the SAML based SSO configuration there is now a Manage roles using group assertions check box on the LDAP SSO configuration page. This allows a base LDAP DN for groups to be set. This will used to look up which groups a user is a member of when they login to the platform.

Groups can be groupOfNames or groupOfUniqueNames and membership will be checked against memberOf or uniqueMemberOf fields respectively.

#  Group Naming

Group names must follow the this pattern ff-<team slug>-role

The valid roles for a user in a team are:

• owner
• member
• viewer
• dashboard

Note: this uses the team slug property to identify the team. This has been chosen to simplify managing the groups in the LDAP Provider - rather than using the team's id. However, a team's slug can be changed by a team owner. Doing so will break the link between the group and the team membership - so should only be done with care.

More details can be found in the SSO LDAP documentation.

#  Managing FlowFuse Admins

In the previous release we added support for managing FlowFuse Admin users by group membership to SAML SSO, this is now available to LDAP as well.

Note: It is advised to maintain a backup admin user that does not authenticate via SSO so ensure access can be maintained if the SSO provider is unavailable. Also the system will not remove the admin flag from a user if that would leave the platform with no admins even if they removed from the group.

This feature is only available to FlowFuse self-hosted customers.

To keep you focused, we have added a "Hide Read" checkbox that is checked by default so that you only see active notifications.

Not only that, we've added some new notifications so that members and owners get fast feedback for important events in your system.

Screenshot showing unread Notifications Inbox in FlowFuse

Screenshot showing read Notifications Inbox in FlowFuse

Having recently added the ability to delete multiple devices at once, we have now added the ability to move multiple devices at once.

To use this feature, navigate to the devices page, application devices or instance devices and place a check in the box next to the devices you wish to move. Once you have selected the devices you wish to move, click the new menu button above the table & select the new location for the devices.

We are are sure this will make managing your devices a good deal easier.

You can read up on the new feature in our documentation.

Snapshots can now be renamed and their descriptions updated, even after they're created.

Screenshot showing the new Edit Snapshots feature in FlowFuse

This is particularly useful for the snapshots that are automatically generated each time your deploy your flows, making it easier to track back your changes and revert to a previous state if needed.

An update to let you know you can now clear the target snapshot of a device group. This is small but useful feature that can help you manage your device groups more effectively.

For those unfamiliar with FlowFuse device groups, essentially, they permit you to deploy a snapshot to one or many devices via a pipeline in a single action. This is great for managing changes across a fleet of devices.

See the device groups documentation for more information on how to make use of device groups.