EasyCatalog 2025 Release Notes

EasyCatalog 2025 20.0.2

20 November 2024

Enhancements

The following enhancements have been made to EasyCatalog and are available in the latest release on our website. Maintenance customers can receive a version of EasyCatalog containing these modifications for an earlier version of InDesign by contacting us via the website. Please be aware, though, that it’s not always possible to include all new features in previous versions.

EasyCatalog

IDSummary/Description
3603Added new option to Record Viewer Panel “View” menu – “Use Default View”
When checked, the Record Viewer panel will use the default view for the data source to determine the order and visibility of the fields.
3594Added ability to group Enhanced Tabular fields

EasyCatalog – Pagination Module

IDSummary/Description
3590Added support for specifying a negative position index, which will use records/groups from the end of the group
e.g. -1 will be the last record in the group; -2 will be the penultimate, etc.

Bug Fixes

The following bugs have been fixed in this release of EasyCatalog. For clarity, the bug reports listed below show the original problem as reported. It is often not possible to detail the fix for each issue as they involve internal changes to EasyCatalog. Note that some bugs listed here refer to issues that were encountered with new features in the beta version by our beta testers and are included here for completeness.

EasyCatalog

IDSummary/Description
3599Changes to the Hyperlink destination attached to GoTo button behaviours are now checked and updated
3600Appearance field option being incorrectly applied to the record rows when editing multiple field options
If the user is editing multiple field options and only specifies a ‘header’ set of commands, these will be incorrectly copied to the ‘body’ appearance commands when copying the field options.
3595An expanded Enhanced tabular field with no content wouldn’t show the contract icon in the panel
3596Changing custom field content to an empty string does not update the field content to be empty
A modification is required so that when a custom field command, or literal text, is removed from the custom field content the fields are blanked-out.
3597“Create Merged Document” is creating multiple documents in the data source “Scripts” folder
3592Replace Fields menu option not working in EasyCatalog Lite
3591The active configuration is not always highlighted in the panel if the configuration contains field definitions

EasyCatalog – Lua Commands

IDSummary/Description
3602Modifications to data source encryption
– Appearance body commands are not encrypted
– Custom fields are not decrypted before being executed, resulting in the encrypted command being output instead
– Encrypted content is now shown as ‘Content is Encrypted’ and greyed out to prevent editing

EasyCatalog – Pagination Module

IDSummary/Description
3601User receives invalid “The specified snippet folder could not be found” error when attempting to paginate using a snippet folder

EasyCatalog – Pagination Module > Formatting Rules

IDSummary/Description
3593When updating a Formatting Rule, the “Usage” attribute may not always default to “Once Per Record” and so Pagination will refuse to use the item

EasyCatalog 2025 20.0.1

Enhancements

The following enhancements have been made to EasyCatalog and are available in the latest release on our website. Maintenance customers can receive a version of EasyCatalog containing these modifications for an earlier version of InDesign by contacting us via the website. Please be aware, though, that it’s not always possible to include all new features in previous versions.

EasyCatalog

IDSummary/Description
3589“Show only columns containing errors” is now a dynamic filter (like the other column filtering options) that will automatically update.
This filter shows columns that contain fields that are ‘in error’ (e.g. overset) and also those containing parsing errors (e.g. malformed custom field commands).
3581Added new ‘View’ menu to the Record Viewer Panel menu
New options available:

* Sort Fields Alphabetically
* Hide Empty Fields

3577The Ungroup Pagination Rule can now be used to release Containers.

Bug Fixes

The following bugs have been fixed in this release of EasyCatalog. For clarity, the bug reports listed below show the original problem as reported. It is often not possible to detail the fix for each issue as they involve internal changes to EasyCatalog. Note that some bugs listed here refer to issues that were encountered with new features in the beta version by our beta testers and are included here for completeness.

EasyCatalog

IDSummary/Description
3585EasyCatalog Reader crashing when selecting InDesign menu options
3587Overset formatted fields are not always shown as ‘in error’ after Update Document
3588Turning off the “Show Empty Columns” column filtering option sometimes hides too many columns
3582Crash when showing Record Viewer panel on Windows when data source contains enhanced tabular fields
3583Replace Fields dialog crashing
3584Enhanced tabular fields not drawing in Record Viewer panel
3578“About” dialog may report “Unknown serial number” instead of the actual activation failure
3579EasyCatalog attempts to validate and activate serial numbers of modules that may have been uninstalled
3576Crash when attempting to log to log file that cannot be opened

EasyCatalog – Scripting Module

IDSummary/Description
3580tagTextRange is no longer available

EasyCatalog 2025 20.0.0

Enhancements

The following enhancements have been made to EasyCatalog and are available in the latest release on our website. Maintenance customers can receive a version of EasyCatalog containing these modifications for an earlier version of InDesign by contacting us via the website. Please be aware, though, that it’s not always possible to include all new features in previous versions.

EasyCatalog

IDSummary/Description
3574Enhancements to the right-click panel menu
– Reorganized the right-click menu options by adding submenus

– Added new right-click menu option to update all ‘xxx’ fields in the book
This option will only appear when a document is open, and the document is part of an open InDesign book.
All instances of the selected field will be updated in all documents in the book.

– Added “Update Panel”
– Added “Update Document”
– Added “Remove Field Markers”
– Added “Download Selected Images” option
– Added “Configurations”
– Added “Subsets” menu, along with “Show All” (which can be found on the “View” right click menu)
– Added Subsets option to filter the panel
– Added Configurations menu
– Added dynamic column filtering, so user can now:
– Show/Hide empty columns
– Show/Hide custom fields
– Show/Hide regular fields
– Show only the columns that contain errors
– Show only the columns that changed during the last sync
– Added the advanced filter options to the “Rows” sub-menu, to allow the user to quickly filter the panel.
– “Show multiple placements” is now a filter option on the “Rows” menu

All of the new column filtering options are dynamic, so columns will appear/disappear automatically when the source data changes.

3575Introduced new Container composition engine to make configuration easier
Further information can be found here: https://www.65bit.com/docs/containers-2025-overview/
3532Improved field name whitespace and case insensitivity support.
Any changes to the case in the incoming field names are applied to the panels on synchronize.
3569Added “Replace Fields” to the Record Viewer/EasyCatalog Lite panel
3552Efficiency improvements when applying advanced row and column filters
3544Added a separate ‘Fixed Width’ option for footer columns in Matrix Tables
3542Added support for long paths (>256 characters) when running on Windows
3537Added a ‘status’ column to the document report to show errors, such as when the data source is unavailable
3530Table cell merging now compares tables inside of cells, so cells containing identical tables can now be merged as well
3523Added a new type of field, IDMS
For further information, see https://www.65bit.com/docs/idms-field-type/
3518Added Shift+Click functionality to the ‘Reveal’ workspace folder button to show location of local user cache when using “Multiple Users Share This Workspace”
3519Added “Download Selected Images” option to the Images sub menu
3502Added warning icons to Barcode field options pane to warn if swatch and/or paragraph style is missing
3500OS Version added to metadata sent during activation to assist with diagnosing issues
3492Panels are now closed when changing workspace folder location
Panels are now closed when changing workspace folder location.
Added warning dialog to inform user that panels will be closed when changing workspace folder location or changing the “Multiple Users Share This Workspace” setting.
3486Added support for showing ‘Help…’ button on error messages when there is a help page available in the knowledgebase
3458Added InDesign compatibility check so that user can be advised to upgrade EasyCatalog via the “Check For Updates” operation
3454Row ID’s and Column ID’s are now optional on delimited tabular fields
3453Speed improvements to linguistic based sorting
3452The field('x') Lua command now returns nil if the field does not exist
3444URL hyperlinks are now checked as part of the Sync with Document process, and will show as ‘in error’ if the hyperlink in the document doesn’t match what’s expected in the panel
Page hyperlinks are not checked as part of this process.
3428When editing multiple field options, only the settings that were changed are applied to the other selected fields
3429Added a more comprehensive list of currencies to Field Options > Format > Currency
3424Significant performance improvement when using ECPAGE hyperlinks to hyperlink to pages in other documents within an InDesign book
3416Added ‘Enhanced Tabular’ Fields
For further information, see https://www.65bit.com/docs/enhanced-tabular-fields/

EasyCatalog > Custom Field Commands

IDSummary/Description
3470GROUPFIRST/GROUPLAST now have an optional parameter to ignore empty fields
Specify TRUE as the fourth parameter to ignore empty values, so the functions will return the first or last populated field in the group

EasyCatalog – Lua Commands

IDSummary/Description
3570Added ability to set visibility and enabled/disable state to static text, hyperlink and group widgets
3571Added ability to set the title of a static text and check box widget
3534TABLE getcolindex and getrowindex now take any number of row-value pairs
3515XML.getnodes() now returns nil and an error message for an invalid XPath expression
3496Enhancements to Lua objects
Added getfieldoption and setfieldoption onto the DATASOURCE object.
Added getfieldnames onto the RECORDSET object, to return a table of field names.
3493Improved Lua error reporting to show a snippet of code containing where the fault is
3475added filterrows to the TABLE object to remove rows where a column isn’t matched a given string
3445Added getfieldname() to the RECORDSET object
3446Added radio widget control
3447Modification to getwidget command to support radio widgets
getwidget command modified to return the selected radio-group option
3439When cancelling HTTP.GET and HTTP.POST, a return code is now returned
HTTP.GET and HTTP.POST will return error code 499 if cancelled
3419TEXT.insertfield and TEXT.insert Lua command now have optional parameters for conditional text to apply

EasyCatalog – Pagination Module

IDSummary/Description
3450Added support for LAB Process colours via the Apply Swatch Named In Field Pagination Rule
Format should be:

LAB:0.5,0.6,0.7

EasyCatalog – Pagination Module > Guide-based

IDSummary/Description
3559Added support for “Pagination Guides” layer in guide-based pagination
If there is a layer called “Pagination Guides”, only the guides on this layer will be used to paginate the data for At Page Guide Positions pagination.
If this layer is not present, the guides on all layers (as previous version) will be used.
3456Added ability to specify different horizontal and vertical gutter measurements when using Guide Based Pagination (Collision Detection)

EasyCatalog – Scripting Module

IDSummary/Description
3494monitorFolder method now clears data sources, open documents and open libraries before calling the script to ensure a consistent state
3430dataviews on the easyCatalogObject can now be referenced by name
app.easycatalogObject.dataviews.itemByName("datav view name").closeDataView()
3423setpaginationoption now supports containerreleasecontainers, which can be true or false

EasyCatalog – XML Module

IDSummary/Description
3480Import and export of field definitions for XML Data Source provider.
Added XML Data Source import and export of field definitions.

Bug Fixes

The following bugs have been fixed in this release of EasyCatalog. For clarity, the bug reports listed below show the original problem as reported. It is often not possible to detail the fix for each issue as they involve internal changes to EasyCatalog. Note that some bugs listed here refer to issues that were encountered with new features in the beta version by our beta testers and are included here for completeness.

EasyCatalog

IDSummary/Description
3564InDesign crashes when attempting to import an image from a URI that ends in forward slash
3563HTML parser now removes the character code 8282 from node content, as this is treated as HTML content
3560Custom fields that are set to update ‘automatically’ are not updated after sync with data source when Smart Synchronize is on
3558Field-specified column widths are not being applied to tables set to populate with no expansion
The field specified from the first record being used to populate the table will be used.
3554Crash when generating UPCA barcode when not enough digits supplied and “Human-Readable Text” turned on
3555If the check digit is calculated for a barcode, it will not be output in the human-readable text
3551If the user turns off formatted content caching, the SnapshotFormatted.dat file is deleted on next synchronize
3546Images from URLs containing umlauts cannot be downloaded on Windows
3545“Duplicate Field” not available for key fields
3541Columns hidden by the right-click filtering are re-appearing after re-ordering columns
3529Inserting an empty tabular field as a table would remove the field markers from the parent field
These need to remain in place to allow the ‘Remove Blank Lines’ feature to work correctly.
3528Updating a tabular field with a filter was not applying the filter.
3527The search results widget is no longer displayed if all of the records are shown in the panel
The search results widget is no longer displayed if all of the records are shown in the panel – for example, if a filter is applied, but all records are still shown, the user will no longer see ‘1234/1234’ in the bottom corner.
3525Fixed issue introduced by InDesign 19.0.5 that would cause New Panel to crash occasionally
3522Changes to Formatting Rules update behaviour
The ‘Usage’ specified in the Formatting Rule Edit Dialog remain fixed and won’t be changed when dragging new items to the rule with different settings
3521Improve Whitespace handling in the HTML parser
<br> tags after a <p> tag were incorrectly getting treated as whitespace, e.g., This should include the <br>:

<html><p><br/>test</p><html>

3506Images are still being downloaded for barcode fields when Location pop-up is set to “URL”
Images are still being downloaded for barcode fields when Location pop-up is set to “URL”, even though the image that’s downloaded will never be imported.
If a field is set to be a Barcode type, the URL options should be ignored.
3513User incorrectly receives “Another user has changed the configuration of this data source since it was loaded.” error message when the data source hasn’t been modified
User incorrectly receives “Another user has changed the configuration of this data source since it was loaded.” error message when the data source had not been modified. This is caused by having the shared workspace on a file server that’s reporting a slightly different modification date/time for the configuration files to what is expected.
3499Removed right-click menu items from Record Viewer/Lite panel that do not apply
3489Quiet zone is missing from around datamatrix barcodes
3490User-defined parameters and data source parameters will sometimes disappear from the Data Source Configuration dialog
3491Changes to user-defined parameters are not always being saved
3484Fixes potential issue where menus can be added to the File > New > EasyCatalog Panel menu that are not removed
If there are a lot of data sources in the workspace folder, or lots of sub folders, it’s possible that EasyCatalog adds menu items for them to the File > New > EasyCatalog Panel menu but they will never be removed (and may also be greyed out).
3482EAN13 barcodes produced with human-readable text now create quite zone space left and right to match EAN specification
3481Reduced timeouts when contacting 65bit servers for background version checks and activation
3478Panel not updating when dragging columns on Windows
When dragging a column to a new position, the user cannot see where it will be dropped.
3474If the folder structure cannot be created to cache downloaded images, an error is not being reported
3427Field Options menu now shows correct field type for barcode, percentage, currency, custom
3422Page hyperlinks are sometimes not inserted when there is in excess of 100 documents in the InDesign book
3421EasyCatalog attempts to sync data source when importing a package created in a single-user workspace into a multi-user workspace
3420De-activating EasyCatalog expires the demo, rather than giving the remaining trial period time

EasyCatalog > Custom Field Commands

IDSummary/Description
3568FOLDERDEEPSEARCH is returning path in incorrect format (HFS instead of POSIX) when the starting folder is a POSIX path
3557Added RAWFIELDSTR to get the raw, unformatted, contents of a field
3543GROUPXREFFIELDLIST crashes if insufficient parameters provided

EasyCatalog – Lua Commands

IDSummary/Description
3539Using the frame:delete() Lua command in a script label can crash pagination
3448Lua DIALOG crash
Fixed crash related to custom widget

EasyCatalog – Pagination Module

IDSummary/Description
3485Update Furniture will sometimes delete furniture box incorrectly if it has to look back multiple pages to find a field

EasyCatalog – Pagination Module > Guide-based

IDSummary/Description
3536Grow and flow library items are sometimes not continued on the next page
Grow and flow library items are sometimes not continued on the next page if:

  • collision detection is being used
  • the item is initially overset

EasyCatalog – Pagination Module > Master

IDSummary/Description
3531Positions that are on a document page are having overrides removed, even though they didn’t come from a master page
Positions that are on a document page are having overrides removed, even though they didn’t come from a master page.
This causes odd behaviour in the document, such as text content appearing multiple times in the same box.

EasyCatalog – Scripting Module

IDSummary/Description
3549Server is incorrectly reporting missing doc parameter for paginateUsingDefaults
3538paginateUsingGuides should ignore the Rule Set parameter if it is empty
3535“Pagination cannot occur on a master page” error not being reported via scripting.
3464paginateUsingDefaults page number parameter not working correctly with master pages pagination
Specifying a page number of 0 will use the currently-selected page, but a page number of 1 will start pagination on page 2.
3451monitorFolder would move the drop folder into the ‘Processed’ or ‘Errors’ folder if the case of the folder name doesn’t match the case of the name provided to the script call

EasyCatalog – XML Module

IDSummary/Description
3533Examples path popup would become permanently disabled if an invalid record XPath was specified
3488If the record XPath contains a {{parameter}}, the “New” field button will not automatically add fields