Composer v0.19.12

Welcome to Hyperledger Composer v0.19.12, which comes with features and fixes to help give you the best Composer experience yet 👍 There are two significant features inbound within this release, so pay special attention to the release notes, and maybe visit the associated documentation, before treating yourself to the Conga Comic at the end 🍾 ⚽️

Features

✨ Ever wanted to get a return value from running a Transaction? Well ... now you can 😱 PRs #4207, #4218, #4219, #4220, #4223, #4224, #4226, #4227 and #4228 come from his Royal Conganess himself, @sstone1. They enable the option to return data to client applications from transaction processor functions. This can be useful for returning a receipt to the submitter of the transaction, or returning an asset modified by the transaction to avoid a separate lookup of the asset after the transaction has been committed.

✨ The same set of PRs deliver the ability to have a "read-only" transaction, whereby the transaction is not committed - it will not be endorsed by multiple peers on the blockchain network, it will not be sent to the ordering service, nor will it publish any events. This feature can be useful when the APIs that client applications can use to read data from the business network are too limited for your use case. For example, a client application may wish to get all of the assets across multiple business networks deployed to multiple channels in a single call to the blockchain network...this (and more) is now possible 👍

Bug fixes

🐞 #4179 is a fix in the angular generator to prevent a forced page refresh after adding assets 🐞 #4204, #4206 , #4209 and #4212 are fixes within the to/fromJSON() process to help with performance 🐞 #4162 exports the classes in the composer-cli package so that they can be consumed, with thanks to @simonghrt for the contribution 👍 🐞 #4200 makes node-plant-uml package in composer-common a dev-dependancy to help put it on a diet, care of @mttrbrts 🐞 #4222 is an edit to the API documentation to correct the naming within the example code, and comes with a shout out to @bjrnt 🎉

Doc Updates

📖 #4230 is the associated documentation for the features delivered within this release. We strongly urge you to check them out. There are two key documentation items here:

1. Returning data from a TPF
2. Read only transactions

Please do read the documentation, and if you really want more information, then check out our integration tests as the examples are being run as part of our regression test suite 👌

Notes

⚠️ If using the Composer tooling to create a Hyperledger Fabric development server, this will now be creating a v1.1.0 server by default. If you are using Composer v0.16.x, you will need to use Fabric v1.0.x, and you must set an environment variable via export FABRIC_VERSION=hlfv1 when using the Hyperledger Fabric development servers provided by Composer.

⚠️ If you have not specified a version in your npm or docker commands when pulling Composer binaries, and you need to keep using Composer v0.16.x, then you *must specify the version number:

• npm install -g composer-cli@0.16.6
• docker pull hyperledger/composer-cli:0.16.6

We strongly suggest that you migrate to Composer v0.19.x instead, but we understand that existing projects may need to stick with Composer v0.16.x for the time being.

⚠️ Business Network Cards are not transferable between v0.16.x and v0.17.x onwards. It will be necessary to manually clear your card store in order to use a different version. Please note that the CLI command to delete a named card will not work correctly if targeting a named card that was created from a different version.

⚠️ The Composer Tools is now setting up a Fabric v1.1 network. Unfortunately only Composer v0.18.2 and above are (and will be) compatible with this alpha driver. There are multiple support splits across differing Fabric levels, so please be careful with what versions are being used:

• v0.18.2, v0.19.0 and above are compatible with the Fabric 1.1.0 driver only
• v0.18.0 -> v0.18.1 are compatible with the Fabric RC1 driver only
• v0.17.3 -> v0.17.6 are compatible with Fabric alpha driver only
• v0.17.0 -> v0.17.2 are compatible with Fabric preview driver only

⚠️ The is a change in the business network lifecycle administration, and business network card commands between v0.18.2 and v0.19.0

Conga Comics

Well, if you hadn't noticed, football (soccer for our US based cousins) fever seems to have kicked in throughout the world ... and never known to have missed a shot @EdMoffatt has scored us a special World Cup Conga Comic featuring "Congalombia" ...

If you are new to Conga Comics, then you can view the complete Conga Comic collection at https://congacomic.github.io/

"Some people are reading the footnote, they think the release notes are all over; it is now".