11 May 2022

HIGHLIGHTS 🌟

Lambdas
Background Task Performance Boost
New Tutorials
Product Enhancements

Lambda Functions 🚀

Code in a No Code platform? We've added support to now include Lambdas in the function stack if you want to use them. Xano will always be a No Code platform first - and you can accomplish everything you need without code - but if you wish to supercharge Xano with JavaScript, now you can!

Lambdas seem to have multiple definitions depending on who you ask... anonymous functions, serverless functions, a snippet of code, etc. The most important takeaway is that it is a way to do business logic in a lightweight manner and return a result using a programming language. In Xano’s case this language is JavaScript.

Yes, Xano is 100% the No Code backend. More importantly, it is a Turing-complete backend, which means it can do anything a programming language can do through variables, conditionals, and loops.

The Lambda feature is a bit taboo, since technically it means that by allowing it to exist, one could argue that Xano has become a Low Code solution. We have thought long and hard on this topic and we strongly believe that the power of Xano increases with this Lambda functionality and we are letting our users decide if they want to use it or not. Check out our documentation to learn more about Lambdas and how to use them in Xano.

Background Task Performance Boost 🚀

Background tasks, also known as Cron Jobs, are used to run business logic automatically on recurring frequencies. They are integral backend components for many users performing a wide variety of processes. Thanks to help from the community we found some room for improvement with how background tasks operate. As a result, we rolled out a significant performance improvement to help boost run times and stability of background tasks.

PRODUCT ENHANCEMENTS 🛠️

FEATURES

[New] Media Storage is Now Served Directly From Google Cloud Storage Buckets - This enhancement improves bandwidth and performance capacity.
[New] Parse_Timestamp Filter - Parse_timestamps allows you to transform any user defined time format into a Unix timestamp in milliseconds, which Xano uses to store timestamps. See how to leverage it in our documentation.
[New] Background Tasks Can Specify a Data Source - Background tasks now have the ability to specify which data source they are using. To choose a data source for a task, open the settings of the task and select which data source you want it to run on.
[New] Return Function - The function stack received a new function stack item. The Return function allows you to make an early exit from the function stack and return a specified payload. This function can be especially useful in conditional statements so you can return a result as soon as you have it.
[New] DPAs for GDPR are Available to Launch Plans - We've expanded our Data Processing Agreements to Launch plans. Now, Launch plans may request a DPA be signed in order to meet GDPR Compliance on Xano.
[New] Run & Debug Timer - We added a timer to Run & Debug, so that when you're testing logic with longer run times you can view the run time live.
[New] External API Request Timeout Increase to 1 Hour - The external API request function now has support to specify a timeout max time of up to 1 hour. This can be helpful when calling a 3rd party API with long run times.
[New] Trim, Ltrim, and Rtrim Filters Now Work on Text Arrays - The trim filters: trim, ltrim, and rtrim now have support to work on text arrays, which is helpful for formatting and transforming text into arrays. See an example in our documentation of leveraging this while chaining other filters together.