This is the release notes for XWiki Commons, XWiki Rendering and XWiki Platform. They share the same release notes as they are released together and have the same version.

This release candidate adds the possibility to configure pages excluded from search, improves the search index and makes it possible to configure the alternative text of the logo, improves the usability and fixes bugs. This release contains security fixes, with the highest severity being 6.5/10.

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki 17.7.0)

Full list of issues fixed and Dashboard for 17.8.0.

For Users

Annotation bubble can now be displayed on the left of the annotation

 
When there is not enough space on the right of the annotated place, the annotation bubble appearing when creating an annotation will now be placed on its left instead of overflowing the viewport.

For Admins

Search Exclusions

 
The Search Application has a new configuration option that allows wiki administrators to specify a list of wiki pages that should be excluded from the search. When a nested page is selected, all its child pages and their descendants are excluded as well. This configuration option is currently taken into account only by the Solr Search Application, which provides a query filter that can be added to Solr search queries. This filter is added by default to the Solr queries executed by the main search page and the search suggest.

Added a logo-description field to color themes

 
It contains the alternative text for the logo of the wiki. The localized value associated to the key core.document.header.logo.image.text is used by default. This field contains an hint in the editor. Hints provided as a specific translation value can now be used for all fields in the editor.

For Developers

Container script service

 
The new container script service, introduced in 17.0.0, was actually not registered so it could not actually be used from scripts. This is now fixed (also in 17.4.5) and it's recommended to use it instead of the deprecated, javax oriented, $request, $response and $sesison bindings.

Solr search index improvements

 
Various improvements have been added to the Solr search index core:

• the id field value for DOCUMENT moved from <document reference>_<real locale> to <document reference>_<locale> (meaning that it always ends with "_" for the default version of the document)
• a new docid field, containing the long value which can also be found in XWikiDocument#getId() has been added to the index, it's also been used to greatly speed up the synchronization check between the database and the Solr index (usually executed at startup)
• the fullname field is now set for all entities, not just DOCUMENT
• a dynamic *_string_lowercase and a corresponding copy field have been added to automatically provide a lower case version of all exact string properties, generally used for object and class properties (those ending with _string)

For once, you won't need to reset your index to apply all that because the search index now also have some migration capabilities. In practice, it means that the new fields will automatically be added (even in the case of a standalone Solr setup) and the documents are automatically re-indexed in the background, without emptying the index first so it should be mostly transparent for users.

Upgrades

The following runtime dependencies have been upgraded (they have a different release cycle than XWiki Commons, XWiki Rendering and XWiki Platform):

Translations

The following translations have been updated: 

• German
• French
• Simplified Chinese

Tested Browsers & Databases

Automated testing

XWiki executes a lot of automated tests during its build, testing all supported configurations. In addition, some manual QA is also executed to try to discover additional problems (see below):

Manual testing

Here is the list of browsers we support and how they have been manually tested for this release:

	Browser	Tested on:
	Mozilla Firefox 143	Not Tested
	Google Chrome 140	Not Tested
	Microsoft Edge 140	Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes
	Safari 18	Not Tested

Here is the list of databases we support and how they have been manually tested for this release:

	Database	Tested on:
	HyperSQL 2.7.4	Not Tested
	MariaDB 11.8	Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes
	MySQL 9.3	Not Tested
	PostgreSQL 17	Not Tested
	Oracle 19c	Not Tested

Here is the list of Servlet Containers we support and how they have been manually tested for this release:

	Servlet Container	Tested on:
	Tomcat 11.0.11	Not Tested
	Jetty 12.0.25 (XWiki Standalone packaging)	Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes
	Jetty 12.0.25	Not Tested

Security Issues

Security issues are not listed in issue lists or dashboards to avoid disclosing ways to use them, but they will appear automatically in them once they're disclosed. See the XWiki Security Policy for more details.

Known issues

• Bugs we know about

Backward Compatibility and Migration Notes

General Notes

• When upgrading make sure you compare and merge the following XWiki configuration files since some parameters may have been modified, removed or added:
  • xwiki.cfg
  • xwiki.properties
  • web.xml
  • hibernate.cfg.xml
• Add xwiki.store.migration=1 in xwiki.cfg so that XWiki will attempt to automatically migrate your current database to any new schema. Make sure you backup your Database before doing anything.

Issues specific to XWiki 17.8.0-rc-1

None.

API Breakages

The following APIs were modified since XWiki 17.7.0:

Unstable APIs

Not real backward compatibility breakages since they were done on APIs marked @Unstable (a.k.a Young APIs). Thus it's part of the contract that they can be broken until they become stable. They're listed purely for reference in case you decided to still use them (and thus agreed to be broken).

• Unstable API: the signature changes here but the API always returned a String so there's no breaking behaviour for scripts.
  • Violation type:

    java.method.returnTypeChangedCovariantly

  • Code:

    ## Old:
    method java.lang.Object com.xpn.xwiki.api.Object::display(java.lang.String, java.lang.String, boolean, boolean)
    
    ## New:
    method java.lang.String com.xpn.xwiki.api.Object::display(java.lang.String, java.lang.String, boolean, boolean)

Credits

The following people have contributed code and translations to this release (sorted alphabetically):

• anonymous 
• Cédric LAMBLIN 
• LucasC 
• Manuel Leduc 
• Marius Dumitru Florea 
• Michael Hamann 
• Nikita Petrenko 
• Simon Urli 
• Simpel 
• Thomas Mortagne 
• Vincent Massol 
• Xiaofei Cui 
• xrichard