New in Data Director 3.8: All Updates at a Glance!

Discover the latest features and improvements in Data Director version 3.8 and how you can revolutionize your ETL processes.

Dual Licensing: More Flexibility for Users

With version 3.8, Blackbit introduces a dual-licensing model for Data Director for Pimcore, giving users more flexibility. Previously, the Data Director was licensed under the GPLv3, which under the terms of that license only allowed use with other GPLv3 or similar libraries (i.e. the Community Edition of Pimcore). Blackbit is now responding to the changing needs of the market and the increasing prevalence of commercial Pimcore licenses. There are now two licenses: the GPLv3 for the Pimcore Community Edition and the Blackbit Commercial License for the Pimcore Enterprise or Professional Edition.

This model offers many advantages: Users can either use the software under the terms of the GPLv3, which includes many freedom rights such as open source viewing and customization options, or they can opt for the commercial license, which offers extended usage rights and support services.

Please note: For licensing reasons, it is not possible to change the license at a later date.

The Data Director under the commercial license is distributed exclusively via the Pimcore Store, including support, free updates, and warranty.

Data Director version 3.8 brings significant improvements to job processing. Subsequent and previous data port jobs now run in the same PHP process. This makes it possible to define functions in a predecessor dataport, use them in the called dataport, and access $params['transfer'] in the successor dataport. This avoids the duplication of code that is required in several places.

Automatic Pimcore-based dataports with the same source and target class are now executed immediately and without a queue if the save was triggered by a real user. This leads to a real-time update of objects when saving, e.g., for the automatic renaming of objects according to a configurable naming scheme, the inheritance of information across different classes, or the automatic assignment of relations.

New Functions for Remote File Systems and Asset Import

Data Director 3.8 offers new features for remote file systems such as FTP, SFTP, FTPS and AWS S3. It supports ** wildcards for recursive traversal of all subfolders and * for any character within the specified folder.

The asset import has also been improved. Now the file name from the HTTP header is used when importing assets via a URL. In addition, there is support for specifying the target folder via 'filename' and the use of placeholders in the archive folder path.

Improvements in the User Interface

The Data Director user interface has been significantly improved in version 3.8. For example, there is now an option to define error email recipients, and the Dataport description field has been converted into a text area to provide more space for comments.

In addition, the attribute mapping now supports multiple selection to remove multiple mappings at once, and a preview for the "initialization function" has been added. The history panel now allows filtering for canceled jobs and shows the custom conditions before the dataport conditions for manually executed jobs to see the differences of the jobs faster.

Further Changes and Performance Improvements

In addition to the major new features, there are numerous smaller changes and performance improvements. These include support for importing images from access-limited APIs (e.g. 100 accesses/minute) and a reduction in the size of the logs.

Other improvements include speeding up the import of large Excel files, support for importing data for a field collection element from multiple raw data elements, and better detection of "empty" image gallery entries. These and other changes make Data Director more powerful and user-friendly than ever.

Further details can be found in the changelog at
https://github.com/BlackbitDigitalCommerce/pimcore-data-director/blob/master/changelog.md#380