Overview:
Update: We, unfortunately, put in the wrong public release date. Umbraco Forms 12.1 and 10.5 will be available on August 17, 2023.
We are releasing functionally equivalent minor updates to Forms 10 and 12, so whether you are on Umbraco's LTS (long-term support) or the latest major version, you'll be able to benefit from the same new features added to Forms.
As with previous releases, we are first issuing release candidates so you can evaluate what’s included and ideally try them out on your existing solutions. Of course, if you do find any issues, or simply have comments for further improvement on the new features, we welcome any feedback.
How to get access to the new version and where to submit any comments and report issues, is discussed at the bottom of the post.
Let’s have a look at what you can expect in this latest release 👀
What’s new in Umbraco Forms 12.1 and 10.5?
This release is primarily around resolution of issues, wrapping up a number of items raised and resolved over the last month or two on the tracker. Whilst some are bug fixes, some require us to introduce new features to best provide a solution, and for this reason we are classifying the release as a minor.
Prevalue Source Caching
Prevalue sources are a feature of Umbraco Forms that allows you to define a set of options used in a form field. When you create a drop-down list or multiple-choice field, you need to define the options that the user can pick from. These can be added individually to each form, but if you want to reuse the same set of options between forms, a prevalue source is the best way to go.
There's a lot of flexibility in defining where the source of options comes from. Out-of-the-box Forms allow you to use text files, SQL queries, or Umbraco content, and you can create custom sources too. Forms historically have cached the information retrieved from the source, which makes sense particularly if the retrieval is expensive or the information changes very rarely.
Unfortunately, the caching behaviour is rather blunt - caching in memory until the prevalue source is saved again, or the website is restarted. This works nicely for prevalue sources whose information is stored within the source definition itself - such as with a text file - but less so if the source is dynamic and can change independently.
To provide more flexibility here, we now allow you to select an appropriate level of caching for each prevalue source.
You can choose between:
- No Caching - no caching will be applied and the list of options will be retrieved from source on every request.
- You will likely only want to choose this option if the information changes frequently and it's important that the latest is presented to website visitors.
- Cache For Specified Time - the list will be cached for the period of time provided.
- Cache With No Expiry - the list will be cached on first request and not retrieved again until either the prevalue source is edited or the website is restarted.
- This is the backward-compatible default, and most appropriate to use for information held within the prevalue source data itself (such as when uploading a text file).
these updates.
