December 2025

Progressive Web App

We are working on support to offer each system as its own Progressive Web App (PWA), as an alternative to installing the Softadmin® app from an app store. This allows systems to apply their own branding.

This release includes a beta version of PWA support. Among other things, notification support is missing and will be delivered in a future version.

AI Features

Embedding Component

Embeddings capture the semantic meaning of text and can be used for semantic search, categorization, or recommendation. The new Embedding component uses an AI model provider to create embeddings from text.

Embeddings are stored as vectors. To support working with vectors on older versions of SQL Server, we have introduced the helper functions SoftadminUtil.Vector_CosineDistance and SoftadminUtil.Vector_ToBinary. However, the vector data type introduced in SQL Server 2025 offers superior performance.

GenAI Support for Reading Files

You can now send images and audio files to the AI through the GenAI component. To use this feature, select a model that is compatible with multimodal input (image or audio).

Technical Changes

More Responsive Events

By default, event listeners poll the database to see if new events have been raised. This puts pressure on the database, while still introducing latency.

To improve latency, when a user has finished running a menu item, any events raised by that menu item's stored procedure will now immediately notify their listeners. This applies to most components that modify the database (like NewEdit or Execute), but not UI components like Grid. For components making multiple calls, it usually only applies to events raised during the Finished/Forward call.

To reduce server load, you can set an event's Polling strategy to Infrequent, relying on menu items to notify the event listener. The listener will still poll occasionally to catch events that need reprocessing (e.g., after deadlocks).

WebDAV

The WebDAV module has been migrated from .NET Framework to .NET 8.

The application pool now requires 64-bit mode, and the site/working directory must have its physical path changed from ...\Softadmin\WebDAV to ...\Softadmin\WebDAV\bin.

Read more.

Database Designer

Extra column properties (friendly name, MS_Description, and GDPR setting) can now be edited regardless of other constraints that prevent edits to a column. Editing extra properties is now also possible for foreign keys.

Foreign keys can now be created from the Create table menu or by connecting two tables in the function block overview.

When adding a new column, a suggested data type can be automatically derived from the column name.