XAF - Updated demos, usability enhancements, important documentation updates and more (v18.2)

Over the last few v18.2 minor releases we introduced several new features. Here are the highlights.

UI & UX Enhancements

1. Introduced in v18.2.3 was the ability to enable accordion control for navigation and you’ve told us you love it, especially the nice search capabilities, SVG support and modern look and feel found in the latest version of Microsoft Outlook. To maintain that same style across your application, we have disabled icons in navigation, and also in all tabs. You can revert to the previous style with images, using the following options: IModelLayoutManagerOptions.EnableLayoutGroupImages, IModelOptionsWin.ShowTabImage and IModelRootNavigationItems.ShowImages. A complete list of default settings for new XAF v18.2 projects is available in the following KB article: Default XAF configuration options and feature toggles.
2. WinForms LookupPropertyEditor's clear buttons (X) are now visible only when editors receive focus providing less noise on typical business forms.
3. Your feedback is important, so new Like and Dislike buttons have been added to the XCRM, MainDemo and SimpleProjectManager apps, let us know what think about each screen.
   
   
   
   
4. As part of our continued WinForms demo modernization we are finishing work on the updated splash screens as well as optionally enabling overlay forms in the logon screen for v19.1. These updated splash screens will be available for customization in newly created projects as well.
   
   
    
5. Inspired by our loyal customers (S133746 and T714543) the Automatic Filtering Row to the Object Model dialog of the Column Chooser in v18.2.7 has now been implemented. The field list can be filtered to easily locate the desired field. Note: incremental search has been available since 2011.
   
   
   

Other enhancements & important news

1. XAF demo pages in both the offline DemoCenter and online https://www.devexpress.com/support/demos/#xaf have been updated. Did you know that if you have v18.2.6 installed you can run our WinForms demos directly by clicking this link: dxdemo://Frameworks/XAF/XCRM? Finally, DPI-Aware mode has been enabled by default for all demos and new projects in v18.2.7 (this article will be updated soon).
2. It is no longer recommend to use XafApplication > TablePrefixes and related APIs. There are now more reliable solutions detailed here this KB article.
3. Explained in the documentation it is recommended that object identifiers are used in criteria instead of references. Many scenarios have been fixed where ObjectDisposedException occurred with the object reference approach. Please see the following tickets for more information: T691669, T691853, T616104, T395155, T469674.
4. Certain edge cases created a SqlException when a link was added on many-to-many collections, the team found a way to avoid the exception, details here (T297673).
5. Good news for Entity Framework users! The standalone and design-time Model Editor now takes full Entity Framework class metadata into account (T711818).

Documentation Updates

Thanks to your feedback we have finished the major updates to the Actions documentation, this includes an overhaul to over a dozen Actions and UI elements articles, the documents have been enhanced with links, scenarios, examples, and illustrations. We hope that the improvements can help you understand Actions better, use them more efficiently, and will answer many of your questions.

Updates have also been made to the following articles on other UI elements, be sure to check them out:

• UI Element Overview - improved the description and added two diagrams to illustrate UI elements' structure.
• Views | List Editors | View Items | Action Containers - additional links, scenarios, and updated descriptions.
• Ways to Access UI Elements and Their Controls - in this new concept, we collated tasks with List Views, View Items and Property Editors frequently asked about, created examples and links for each task to help provide solutions. 
• How to: Access Master Detail View and Nested List View Environment – provided descriptions to four common scenarios and added new examples.
• Collection Properties in XPO - Added more information about collection properties, provided new examples, and detailed information about Actions and Action visibility for each collection.
• Using a Custom Control that is not Integrated by Default
• How to: Access the List Editor's Control
• Ways to Show a Confirmation Dialog

Security system users should not miss Merging of Permissions Defined in Different Roles where we describe how the Security System processes permissions for users with several roles.

Please take a look at the new documentation and let us what you think by leaving a comment below or use the updated feedback form on docs.devexpress.com (bottom right corner).

Coming soon in v19.1 - Inspired by your feedback we are making sure that all TOP 100 popular XAF and XPO APIs have code examples for you to easier to get started with. 

Interesting Support Center Tickets

1. New suggested ways to improve Pivot Grid List Editor performance when using large amounts of data (T687056).
2. How to avoid excessive ConditionalAppearance rule updates and improve overall form performance by following these tips: S171794.
3. There are some users who prefer the old E4037 example over the recommended Use Google, Facebook and Microsoft accounts in ASP.NET XAF applications solution in ASP.NET. If you encounter similar requirements then we would love to hear from you by providing answers to the questions asked in T705146. 
4. The article on how to create business classes and members at runtime (T284822) has been improved.
5. On the recent blog post, it was recommended using nameof keyword instead of hardcoded property names in XPO business objects. This can be done using the CodeRush templates. For any of your existing applications, ticket T713839 contains some regular expressions to use in Visual Studio's Find and Replace | Replace in Files dialog. 
6. How to group Actions from a category within a drop down or context menu (T709407).
7. New solutions to show a popup window from another popup (T711034).
8. Fixed an issue with DBUpdater ("An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format") when a target project's 'Platform target' property is 'x64' (T707637).
   
9. A warning about namespaces for VB.NET users of the ORM Data Model Wizard (T705913).
10. Clarification on the use of Session in XPO objects vs the use of IObjectSpace to run your business logic (T716446).

Your Feedback is needed!