Archive - release notes 2019

December 16, 2019 - Bosch IoT Things - service update

Our last service release for 2019 comes with various changes:

  • Definition for your things
    The JSON model of a thing has been extended to support a new optional definition field at the thing level to reference a thing/device abstraction model.
    Find details at Concepts > Things and features > Definition . This new definition field facilitates to search for things, which have the same definition.
    Get familiar with the definition sub-resources for the HTTP API at https://apidocs.bosch-iot-suite.com

  • Improved payload mapping for status information
    Incoming and outgoing JavaScript mappings now additionally provide a status parameter.
    The status code indicates the result of the command, e.g. 200 indicates that your command was executed successfully.

  • Billing of transactions
    Your quota consumption may vary depending on how active your devices and your users are.
    To facilitate your estimation regarding which type of service plan fits better to your needs, the Things dashboard now shows the consumed quota on managed data volume as well as the transactions count for the current month.
    Find an example at Getting started > Booking > Manage your solution
    Note: If you run into limits, feel free to upgrade your plan. Otherwise, in case you run out of transactions, you will need to wait until the start of the next month.

  • Documentation moved
    With this service update our documentation moved from https://things.eu-1.bosch-iot-suite.com/dokuwiki/ to https://docs.bosch-iot-suite.com/things/.
    Pages at https://things.eu-1.bosch-iot-suite.com/dokuwiki/ will not be available in future. Please update your bookmarks.

  • Examples on GitHub moved
    The repository for the examples on GitHub has been renamed https://github.com/bosch-io/iot-things-examples

December 10, 2019 - Bosch IoT Things - service update

The new service release comes with various changes, as for example:

  • Adoption of the new command-and-control pattern provided by Bosch IoT Hub.

    “The control prefix in the northbound and southbound Command & Control endpoints has been renamed to command. The endpoint names with the control prefix are still supported but deprecated. The northbound endpoint for business applications to receive command responses has the command_response prefix now. The old control prefix for the receiver address is also still supported but deprecated.”

    • All new connections will use the new pattern by default to support device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device communication patterns alike.
    • In case you have configured your Hub-to-Things connection manually, you will need to migrate the connection until Feb 2020.
  • Support of custom addresses and header mappings for replies

    • See subject ID placeholder {{ request:subjectId }}
      Tip: You can use it for the “reply-to” property.
    • The placeholder is available for Connection sources and Connection targets.
  • End support for relations
    The relations resource at the Bosch IoT HTTP API v1 has been announced deprecated in November 2018. Now the time has come to end support for that resource.

At this occasion, various minor bugs have also been fixed.

November 7, 2019 - Bosch IoT Things - service update

The new service release comes with various changes, as for example:

  • Improved Connections functionality:
    • New HTTP forwarding of updates/events to external endpoints. This way you can simply manage webhook-like integrations with existing or new applications based on standard HTTP calls. By defining an URL pattern, applying payload mapping and filtering you can customize the requests triggered for your digital twin updates/events. See Which API to use? for an overview, and Manage your connections for more details.
    • Multiple messages per mapping
      The possibility to define multiple outputs after mapping is supported. This way you can trigger multiple updates/events for one incoming or emitted message. The functionality is accessible within the JavaScript-based payload mapping of managed connections.
      Find details at Connection > mappings.
    • New ConnectionStatus feature to represent device readiness for communication within your digital twins. The connection status - reported directly by devices, or indirectly by Bosch IoT Hub - will appear automatically in all things using a connection, which activates this functionality. Find details at Connections > mappings.
  • New OAuth2 based authentication with the Java client
    See Eclipse Ditto Client SDK Java for details.
  • End of support for Topologies
    We will remove the topologies functionality from Bosch IoT Things as it wasn’t used on a large scale during its BETA phase. We plan to provide simpler concepts to structure thing entities in the future.
    Meanwhile you still have the option to use non-device-related thing entities to describe simple structures. E.g. use an own namespace for your ‘topology-things’ and just reference the things that are part of that topology in one of its features. You could also reference other ‘topology-things’ in another feature of it.

October 14, 2019 - Bosch IoT Things - service update

The new service release comes with various improvements and bug fixes.

September 5, 2019 - Bosch IoT Things - service update

The new service release comes with various improvements.

  • For creating a fine-grained policy which controls your Things subscription instance itself, the Policy resource now supports setting a fine-grained path to grant or revoke permissions on. See Policy > Which Resources can be controlled > Solution . Find an example of such a Policy of a solution.
  • The Things service additionally supports authorization via a project specific OAuth2 authorization server. See Updates at the HTTP API.
  • As already announced in previous service update notes, your thing and its policy need to be created in a namespace registered for your service instance. Henceforth, this requirement is enforced by our APIs, thus you will get an error message when trying to create things or policies with a namespace which has not been registered for your service instance. * Canceled support for deprecated prefixes in a policy. Find details at Updates at the HTTP API
  • New entries in our list of Restrictions
    • JSON Integers The range of integer values allowed is from -9223372036854775808 to 9223372036854775807. This is the limit of a 64 bit signed integer, also known as long integer.
    • Number of OAuth scopes in a JWT 20 - i.e. if your custom OAuth2 authorization provider issues a JWT with more then 20 scopes, we will only accept the first 20.

At this occasion, various minor bugs have also been fixed.

July 17, 2019 - Bosch IoT Things - service update

The new service release comes with various improvements for better supporting the Bosch IoT Suite for Asset Communication package:

  • Connection recovery The Things service now tries to recover automatically connections, which have been created in line with booking an instance of the Bosch IoT Suite for Asset Communication package, and might not appear ready-to-use at the first check. However, in case you still encounter connections marked with ! at the Things dashboard, the easy way to try to manually recover it would be to close and then re-open the connection. Find details at Bosch IoT Suite for Asset Communication > Getting started >
  • New header x-things-parameter-order
    This header has been introduced to support messages (e.g. operation request to a gateway or device) which need to ensure a fixed the parameter order. Find details at Protocol specification and an example at FAQ > How to make sure my message payload follows a specific order?

At this occasion, various minor bugs have also been fixed.

July 4, 2019 - Bosch IoT Things - service update

The new service release comes with improvements for managing your connection, and various minor bug fixes.

Additionally to the Metrics view, we have now introduced a Log entries view.

This view will help you as a developer to search for specific log entries, and thus, to hunt for bugs and messages, which failed to reach their destination.

tip See Manage your connections UI > Metrics

log entries example

May 21, 2019 - Bosch IoT Things - service update

The new service release comes with various search improvements:

Among others, the new Search now supports:

  • Various internal fields, which can be used in a search filter, or to be part of your search results
  • New paging options via cursor
    • You can for example limit the first search results to <your-number> items (default 25).
    • The cursor marks the position after the last entry of the previous search to “bookmark” where to start the next set of result.
    • The paging option limit({offset},{count}) is deprecated. In case you still use the old option, slow queries or timeouts might occur. Also, the old options might be removed without further notice.
    • See Search > Paging options

At this occasion, various minor bugs have also been fixed.

May 8, 2019 - Bosch IoT Things - service update

The new service release comes with various changes:

  • Search has been re-worked. Among others, it now supports:

    • The not operator. See Search > not for details.
    • Various internal fields:
      • _modified
      • _revision
      • _namespace
  • More special characters in IDs allowed. Following characters as well as control characters (hex 00-1F and 7F-FF) have to be encoded similar to URL-encoding by replacing them with %XX where XX is the hex code of the character.

    • / = “%2F”
    • ? = “%3F”
    • # = “%23”
    • * = “%2A”
    • , = “%2C”
    • '' '' = “%20” (blank)
    • % = “%25”
    • " = “%22”

At this occasion, various minor bugs have also been fixed.

April 11, 2019 - Bosch IoT Things - service update

The new service release comes with various changes, as for example:

  • Scripted solution configuration
    • In case you need to configure settings regarding your connections, the easy way is to use the UI. However, with this release we also support scripting your solution settings.
    • Find an example and details regarding the solution policy at Policy of a solution.
  • Preparation for new search API implementation.
    • At this occasion the wildcard for a complete feature ID, e.g. ("features/*/properties ..."), is deprecated.
    • The new search is subject to be deployed with an upcoming release.
  • New notation for a Bosch ID within a policy.
    • A Bosch ID was supported to be used as an unique identifier within a policy. Since the JWT also carries the client ID we support to also add this ID.
    • The new pattern is "bosch:your-bosch-user-ID@ciamids_36xxx-client-ID": {"type": "bosch-id"}
    • In order to avoid ambiguity, henceforth we recommend to use the new notation.
    • Find an example and details regarding the policy at Policies.

At this occasion, various minor bugs have also been fixed.


April 2, 2019 - Bosch IoT Things - service update

The new service release comes with various changes, as for example:

At this occasion, various minor bugs have also been fixed.

March 18, 2019 - Bosch IoT Things - service update

The new service release comes with various changes, as for example:

  • New placeholders and placeholder functions for configuring connections. While editing the sources and targets of your connection you can make use of them. Find details at Concepts >
  • List your things - search request via the Things dashboard
    • New tab for listing the thing entities of the currently authenticated Bosch ID
    • Advanced query with all RQL supported by our Search HTTP API
    • Find details at Manage your things UI.

At this occasion, various minor bugs have also been fixed.

February 25, 2019 - Bosch IoT Things - service update

The new service release comes with various changes, as for example:

  • The Things service can also be used as part of the Bosch IoT Suite for Asset Communication package.
    • The package offering itself is Beta.
    • Subscribing the package Free plan is supported in self-service.
    • The new Device Provisioning HTTP API (also Beta) simplifies provisioning of devices by registering them at Bosch IoT Hub and Bosch IoT Things with a single API call.
  • Preparation steps for billing of transactions
  • More information about your connections configured via the Things dashboard
    • New tab for metrics/statistics of Hub, AMQP and MQTT connections
    • Tabular display of number of messages: overview, by source, by target, response
    • Preparation for display of log entries
    • Find details at Manage your connections
  • The page Restrictions contains more details regarding the payload mapping for messages.
  • The details regarding relations have been removed.
  • Preparation steps for improving search
  • Changes on the service broker for the Bosch IoT Cloud - New pricing for Standard plan. Customers who have booked the standard plan with the previous pricing do not need to change anything.

At this occasion, various minor bugs have also been fixed.

January 15, 2019 - Bosch IoT Things - new client

The new service release comes with various changes, as for example:

  • New Things-client version 4.0 Find details and migration notes regarding the client at Things-client version 4.0.
  • Support of a new type of Web Token for authorization at the HTTP API, namely Suite Auth token - BETA

At this occasion, various minor bugs have also been fixed.

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