2021.1 Migration Guide

Version 2021.1 introduces Collaboration Permissions, improves the form field values API, and adds the ability to correlate logs emitted for a single request.

There are no specific upgrade steps for this release. Please follow our regular Upgrading guide for instructions.

Collaboration Permissions

Collaboration Permissions is a new, powerful permission system for PSPDFKit for Web and PSPDFKit Server. The new group property added to annotations, comments, and form fields allows you to control access to these resources using the Server API.

Learn more in our Collaboration Permissions guide.

Form Field Values API Improvements

The form field values API now exposes the type of the form field associated with the value. This helps you determine if the value should be a single string (e.g. in the case of text form fields) or an array of strings (like with checkboxes).

Request ID in Logs

With this release, PSPDFKit Server now tags logs with a unique request_id label, which helps correlate logs associated with the same request. You can also provide a custom request ID by supplying an extra HTTP header.

Read about the request ID in the Monitoring Overview guide.

Asset Retrieval Metrics

This version adds a new assets.fetch_asset metric, which tracks the time it takes to retrieve an asset from the asset storage. It lets you see if documents are loading slowly because the asset storage is not keeping up with the demand.

Check out the new metric in the Metrics Reference section of the Available Metrics guide.

Configuration

This release introduces two configuration changes:

  • The new SIGNING_SERVICE_TIMEOUT variable was added. It allows you to specify how long Server should wait for the response from a signing service when creating a digital signature.

  • The ASSET_STORAGE_CACHE_PATH variable was removed.

See the updated Configuration Overview page for more information.

Scheduled Removal of the Local Asset Storage Backend

The local asset storage backend has been deprecated since version 2017.7. We plan to remove support for it completely in version 2021.3.

If you haven’t done so yet, see the storage migration section of the Asset Storage guide for instructions on how to move to PostgreSQL or the S3 asset storage backend.

Other Changes

This release includes many more improvements. For a full list of changes, check out the Server changelog.

Migrate PSPDFKit for Web

For more information, please take a look at the PSPDFKit for Web 2021.1 Migration Guide.