We are proud to announce the publication of the ProR 0.6.0 snapshot.  While still in incubation, this version provides some significant improvements with respect to usability.  If you use ProR 0.5.0, you can update your installation simply via Help | Check for Updates.  Try it now, or download it here.

The highlights of 0.6.0 include:

• Drastic performance improvements!  One of our test files used to take 4 minutes to open.  We reduced this to 5 seconds.
• Better XHTML-handling.  For instance, better labels are now shown.  But to get some real powerful XHTML handling, we encourage you to install the ProR Essentials.
• Default Presentations: A presentation is a plug-in that provides improved handling of certain data types.  It is now possible to associate certain presentation handlers with Datatypes.  For instance, when installing the ProR Essentials, the XHTML presentation automatically becomes the default handler for XHTML content (more below).
• Default Values: ReqIF allows attributes to provide a default value.  This default is now being used when appropriate.
• Smart processing of non-ProR-Files: Many tools can write ReqIF.  When opening such a file in ProR, it now performs some analysis to set the columns, to provide meaningful labels, etc.
• Many bug fixes: We removed a number of annoyances, including some bugs with selection management, refreshing of elements, color rendering, etc. In total, we resolved 21 issues (Bugzilla).

We will also release an update of the Essentials within the next days – please stay tuned, we’ll announce it here.  In the following, we will describe the new default presentations in more detail:

Default Presentations

The rendering of some content can be improved drastically with additional Presentations.  A good example is the XHTML rendering.  By default, ProR only shows a simplified text representation of the formatted text (see “Before” below).  However, the XHTML-Plug-in from the ProR Essentials does real rich text rendering.  This has been available before.  However, before, you had to specifically configure a Datatype to use the new presentation.  This was tedious, especially for files that were not created by ProR.  But with default Presentations, this is not necessary any more.

Presentations can register themselves as handlers.  The XHTML Presentation from the ProR Essentials does exactly this: Once installed, all elements of type DatatypeDefinitionXHTML will be rendered using the Presentation.  Of course it is possible to set defaults manually as well.

Default Presentations are configured via Window | Preferences.  There is an entry ProR with a sub-entry Default Presentations.  The following screenshot shows this, after the installation of the ProR Essentials:

As you can see, presentations are registered for String and XHTML.  Most entries are set to none, meaning that there is no default, and that the build-in representation is used.  All drop-downs have an additional entry Use Build-in (shown for Date).  This setting means that new Presentations must not override the build-in handling.

As a result, without any additional configuration, XHTML content will be rendered properly.  The following shows the same ReqIF File, before and after installing the ProR Essentials:

As you can see, the new presentation from the ProR Essentials now supports embedded objects, in addition to formatted text.  But this will be the subject of a future blog post.

We hope that you enjoy the new features of ProR.  We are aware that ProR is still rough on some edges, but nevertheless gets better every day.  We strive to react promptly to feedback, so we encourage you to provide us with bug reports, compliments, criticism or any other kind of feedback via the ProR web site.

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