Spring is just around the corner, and we’re excited to announce our March 2025 m-Power update! This release is packed with valuable enhancements designed to improve both developer productivity and end-user experience. From an intuitive new date picker to advanced cascading dropdown capabilities, we’ve incorporated many customer-requested features that will make your m-Power applications even more powerful.

Important Note: This update and all future updates require JDK17 and Tomcat 10. To check your current versions, navigate to Admin → Status, Version & Update → Version & Update, where both Java and Tomcat versions are displayed.

Webinar Alert! Want to see these features in action? Join our upcoming webinar on March 6th! We’ll demonstrate each enhancement in detail and answer any questions you may have. You can register for the webinar here:  March 2025 m-Power Update Webinar.

Here are the enhancements included in this release candidate:

Enhanced Cascading Dropdown Lists

Many of you requested more flexibility with dropdown dependencies, and we listened! The new logic now supports:

• Multiple dependencies between dropdown lists
• “Is in the List” relationship support
• Fine-grained control over which fields are required in dependent lists

For example, you can now create three dropdown lists where the third list depends on selections from both the first and second lists–a capability not possible in previous versions.

Streamlined Date Range Picker

This enhancement allows users to select both start and end dates from a single input, eliminating the need to interact with separate calendar pickers for “from” and “to” dates. This small change will make a big difference in your users’ daily experience!

Subtotal Improvements

We’ve added more flexibility to how subtotals appear in your reports:

• New Layout Options: Developers can now show subtotal levels above their corresponding detail (rather than the default below) through:
  • A new template option in regular reports
  • Easy subtotal header configuration in m-Painter
• Hide Repeating Subtotal Data: Building on our existing capability to hide repeating data at the detail level, we’ve extended this functionality to the subtotal level as well.

Excel Export Enhancements

Excel exports continue to be a popular feature, and we’ve made several improvements:

• Line Breaks in Headers: Column headings with line breaks are now properly displayed in Excel exports
• Leading Zeros Preserved: Leading zeros are now maintained when exporting obvious non-numeric fields
• Export Options: During our upcoming webinar, we’ll review all Excel export options, including the recently added Formatted Excel export that closely mirrors your m-Painter customizations

Graphing Improvements

This release candidate also brings improvements to data visualizations:

• Custom Bar/Line Colors: Easily customize the colors of individual bars or lines in your graphs directly from the m-Painter graph editor
• Improved Number Formatting: Based on user feedback, we’ve enhanced number labels (e.g., changing “20M” to “20,000,000” for better readability)
• Simplified Report Graphing: While most users create graphs in dashboards, we’ve streamlined the process of adding graphs directly to reports with a new “Current Report” option

Administrative Controls & Time-Saving Features

• Maximum Web Records Governor: Administrators can now set a platform-wide maximum limit on the number of rows a report can return, with the ability to exempt specific reports from this limit
• Simplified Distinct Records: When inserting dropdown lists in m-Painter, developers can now specify whether they want distinct rows returned—streamlining the process and improving support for data model dropdown lists
• Customizable Date/Time Formats: Reports can now display the current date/time in your preferred format, rather than being limited to ISO format

As always, we value your feedback and suggestions. These improvements reflect our commitment to making m-Power the most efficient and user-friendly development platform possible.

From all of us at the mrc team, thank you for your continued partnership!