vSphere Client SDK 6.7 Update 3 Release Notes

What's in the Release Notes

• Overview
• What's New
• Resolved Issues
• Known Issues

Overview

The vSphere Client 6.7 Update 3 SDK enables development of vSphere Client plugins supported on both vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS.

What's New

This release of the vSphere Client and the SDK introduces the following improvements:

• Plugin Management UI enhancements:
  
  • Enabling and disabling plugins is now available only to the users of the Administrators group allowing better security of managing plugins.
  • Failures from more plugin deployment scenarios: plugin download timeout, remote plugin configuration errors, etc.
  • Error messages for plugin vCenter Server tasks are populated as Task status messages.
• Recommended UX patterns are now part of the HTML sample:
  • Navigation from one plugin view to another with the option to pass custom data using app.navigateTo() API.
  • Summary portlet links to a Monitor view where users get more detailed in-context information.

Resolved Issues

Flash plugins are reported as incompatible in the Task Console of the vSphere Web Client.

Symptoms: The "Deploy plug-in" tasks produced by the vSphere Client (HTML) are automatically displayed in the vSphere Web Client (Flash) together with errors indicating incompatible Flash plugins.

Fix: Flash plugins are now reported by vSphere Client (HTML) with status "Completed" and result providing more information about the incompatibility with the vSphere Client (HTML).

Plugin Management UI tasks are not localized.

Symptoms: The summary and the description of the "Download plug-in", "Deploy plug-in" and "Undeploy plug-in" tasks are always displayed in English-US even when the vSphere Client locale is different.

Fix: Plugin Management UI tasks and messages are localized in the locale of the vSphere Client.

Plugin Management UI does not create vCenter Server tasks for plugins present in the plugin-packages folder.

Symptoms: Logs contain an exception that a vCenter Server task could not be created for a given plugin.

Fix: Deployment of plugins from the plugin-packages folder is handled by a single "Deploy plug-in" task.

The layout of plugin modal headers is sometimes not properly aligned.

Symptoms: Modal headers icon is cut off and long titles are displayed outside the modal header borders.

Fix: Icon is always shown in full and modal size adapts to long and localized header content.

Plugin portlets are shown with scrollbars.

Symptoms: Portlets defined by plugins are shown with vertical scrollbars even when the height of the content fits the size of the portlet iframe.

Fix: Calculation of scrollbars has been fixed to always consider the correct content height.

Navigating to a plugin view which is currently open has no effect.

Symptoms: Using the app.navigateTo() API to navigate to a plugin view which is on focus does nothing.

Fix: Using the app.navigateTo() API to navigate to a plugin view which is on focus causes a reload of the plugin view's content.

Known Issues

The shutdown.sh script does not work on Mac OS when local.development flag is set.

Symptoms: On Mac OS the shutdown.sh script does not stop the server locally and subsequent execution of startup.sh script would fail to start the server (although it reports success).

Workaround: Run jps -l command and kill the org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap processes.

By default the pickup folder is not available on the application server to deploy bundles in local development mode.

Symptoms: The pickup folder is missing from the server directory and cannot be used for development by default.

Workaround: Add pickup.deployer=true to your webclient.properties file.

Two portlets in the same plug-in cannot share the same URL.

When a vSphere Client plug-in contains two portlets, they must specify different values for their attributes. Otherwise, a global refresh operation updates only one of the portlets.

Symptoms: Global refresh updates only one of the extensions having the same URL.

Workaround: Assign different URLs to the two portlets. For example:

   <extension id="portlet1">
          ...
                  <url>/vsphere-client/chassisa/resources/host-portlet1.html</url>
          ...
   </extension>
   <extension id="portlet2">
          ...
                  <url>/vsphere-client/chassisa/resources/host-portlet2.html</url>
          ...
   </extension>

Memory leak with Microsoft Internet Explorer 11.

vSphere Client's memory consumption increases steadily when using Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 with iframes in vSphere Client plug-ins. (This issue is reported at https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/issues/8449104/)

Symptoms: Memory increases on IE11 with each opened plugin iframe leading to OutOfMemory error after some time.

Workaround: Use other browsers supported with the vSphere Client, such as Chrome or Firefox.