The second release of OL Connect is expected to be available before the end of November 2022. The new version introduces an Upland re-branding and brings forward the OL Connect brand name. There are more than 70 improvements, including low-code personalization using expressions, and versioning collaboration capabilities, among others. Keep reading to learn more!

Soft re-branding

Not exactly a feature, but you will notice we have revamped the look and feel of PlanetPress Connect, PReS Connect and PrintShop Mail Connect to match the brand image of Upland. All three products will use the same colors in order to provide a unified look. The image below gives you a taste of what to expect. Further to this we’re highlighting the OL Connect brand by bringing it forward, with the individual identifiers (e.g. PlanetPress) becoming smaller and in the background.

Low-code personalization using expressions

When your OL Connect template requires many user scripts, it can quickly become hard to maintain. These scripts quite often perform basic find/replace tasks (aka Text Scripts). Having a script for each find/replace action feels like a lot of overhead for this seemingly easy task.

With version 2022.2, OL Connect Designer supports Handlebars expressions in the main editor. An expression is a variable wrapped with double curly braces (for example: {{firstName}}). They are automatically replaced with the value of the matching data field and don’t require a User Script. The latter drastically reduces the number of scripts for a typical OL Connect template. Expressions are simple text strings, this makes them easy to insert, rearrange and style. And above all, they are optimized for performance.

Expand and collapse JSON data fields

The expander arrow of a JSON data field in the Data Model panel turns these fields into a tree structure proving an easy way to inspect child properties. Use drag and drop to add the property to the main editor. This inserts a Handlebars expression using the dot notation, which looks up the value of that property on previewing and outputting the document.

The following image shows an expanded JSON data field in the Data Model. Expression for the address, postal and city were added to the main editor. The {{address.street}} expression will lookup the street property of the address data field.

Text Helpers for Handlebars expressions

The Text Helper for Handlebars wizard provides an easy way to create a custom expression helper. It provides the same functionality as the Text Script wizard and allows you to concatenate data fields and optionally provide a prefix and suffix content. The name of the helper can be used as an expression in the content.

The following shows a classic Text Script approach to create an address block, but using the Handlebars Text Helper instead. When there are empty fields in the data, the respective line is skipped. This prevents empty lines from showing up in the text. In the example below, this means there will be no empty line if there is no company specified in the data.

Versioning – remote repositories and tags

The Versioning feature gets major improvements in OL Connect 2022.2.

OL Connect’s versioning feature now extends collaboration capabilities by allowing users to share Projects through online repositories like Bitbucket, GitHub or Azure DevOps. You can create a local clone of a remote repository, work locally on some resources, and then publish them back online so that other users can retrieve your changes while they work on other resources in the same project.

We’re also introducing the ability to apply tags to projects. A tag marks a particular commit with a user-defined identifier. This allows you to mark milestones in your project, to define version numbers or to identify at which stage of development your resources are. Here, for instance, tags are used to identify which version of a resource is being used in Production and which one is currently being tested:

Tags can also be published to the online repository.

Note also that the Sample Projects are now automatically versioned when you create one, giving you a head start with Versioning.

Other improvements

Installers

The installers for OL Connect Workflow and OL Connect have some usability improvements that also make them more aligned with each other.

• Both installers are now packaged as .EXE files.
• Desktop shortcuts are now optional in both installers (and turned off by default).
• The start menu is the same for both, and the names of the shortcuts have been shortened.
• The size of the Connect installer has been decreased, it is now similar in size to the Workflow installer.
• The installers are now similarly styled.

Workflow

• The Execute Data Mapping and Retrieve items tasks now have an option to return data in a simplified JSON structure. The data is described in simple key-value pairs and detail tables use the array notation. This will help make processing the return values much more straightforward.