The first beta release of Node-RED 2.1.0 is now available.
The Change Log has the full list of changes in this release, but here are the highlights.
Note: if any issues are reported against the beta, we'll update this post to list them here. If you hit a problem, please do check back here before adding a comment.
Known Issues
- Flow tab doesn't show as disabled - link - fixed in git
- Long module names cause layout issues in Help sidebar - link - fixed in git
- Tour Guide is unreadable with Solarized Light theme - link
- Markdown rendering of node-help broken - fixed in git
New Welcome Tour Guide
The first time you open the editor with 2.1.0, you will be greeted with a new Welcome Tour. This will highlight a lot of the new features in this version.
The Tour will only be shown the first time you open any particular version of Node-RED - and you can opt-out of seeing them in the future in the User Settings dialog.
If you embed Node-RED in your own application and don't want the tour to be shown to your users, then it can also be disabled in the settings file.
The underlying framework for creating the Welcome Tour can be reused to create other interactive tours/tutorials/guides. We'll have move in this area in the future.
Hiding tabs
We often hear from users who have a lot of tabs. To make it a bit easier to manage, you can now hide tabs in the editor.
The Info sidebar list of tabs shows which tabs are hidden, and they can be shown with a single click.
There's also a new tab menu that provides more options around managing the tabs.
For this first release of the feature, the hidden state of a tab is stored in user preferences within the editor - it is not a property of the flow itself. This means you can't share a set of flows with another user and have some of the tabs pre-hidden. It is an open point of discussion as to whether we want to allow that behaviour.
Auto-complete in msg TypedInputs
The msg TypedInputs are used widely throughout Node-RED. To make life a bit easier, they now provide auto-complete when typing message property names.
For now, it offers completions from the list of well-known properties the core nodes use.
In the future, it will be possible for contrib nodes to register the properties they use so they can be offered as completions as well.
We're also thinking about how best to apply this to flow/global inputs - auto-completing based on the current contents of context.
Edit & Arrange menus
The main menu now has Edit and Arrange submenus.
The Edit menu has the actions you'd expect - Undo, Redo, Copy and Paste etc.
The Arrange menu adds tools to help arrange your nodes.
All of the menus now also show any keyboard shortcuts that have been set.
Flow/Group level environment variables
We have supported Environment Variables being set within Subflows for a while now. With this release, you can now also set them at the Flow or Group level.
New Link Call node
The new Link Call node can be used alongside the Link-In/Out nodes to create subroutine-like flows.
If you have a flow that starts with a Link-In node and ends with a Link-Out node that has been put into its new 'return' mode (giving the node a different icon), the Link Call node can be used to pass that flow a message and the result is passed back to the calling node.
Deep copy option on Change node
The Change node's "set" action has a new option to create a deep copy of the value when copying from msg, flow or global.
In the case of Objects and Arrays, this creates a proper clone of the value, rather than creating a reference to the same object.
We've also updated the label of the "set" action to hopefully help users get the 'from' and 'to' fields the right way around.
Delay node updates
When in rate limiting mode, the Delay node supports two new features:
- if
msg.toFrontis set, a message is put to the front of the queue of messages waiting to be sent - there's a new option to send rate limited messages to an optional second output on the node. This is useful if you need to rate limit messages and do some further processing for the the messages that have been rate limitied, rather than just have them discarded.
Join node reset timeout
If the Join node has a timeout running and it receives a message with msg.restartTimeout set, it will restart the timeout.
File nodes renamed
The file and file in nodes have new palette labels to make it clearer which writes to files and which reads from files. Even after all this time, I would have to double check which was which.
Documentation Update
Whilst not really part of the beta, we've also published lots of updates to the API documentation on the website.
This includes the hooks and library store APIs in the runtime.
The docs now cover more of the APIs available to nodes and plugins to extend the UI.
There is also documentation on creating custom Theme plugins.
Be sure to read through the Change Log to see what else is in there.
Installing the beta
If you want to try out the beta, you will need specify node-red@next when you use npm to update. Without the @next you'll still get 2.x
So on a Pi you'd do:
sudo npm install -g --unsafe-perm node-red@next
Reporting problems
If you hit any problems, please report them either as a reply on this topic, or in the #core-dev slack channel. Please do not post new topics to the forum regarding the beta as that could confuse users who are not using the beta.
Outstanding work
There are a couple more PRs that could still make the cut-off - including the long awaited mqtt-control node. We'll see how they progress over the next couple weeks before the final release.
But as it stands, the goal is to release 2.1.0 later this month.
