Highlighter Documentation

What's New in Highlighter

Stay informed about the latest features, enhancements, and improvements to the Highlighter platform.

Scheduled Case Creation

Release Date: September 2026

A Workflow Order can now create a Case for chosen entities every day. Pick the entities in the Scheduled Case Creation section of the Order's page. Each night, while the Order is approved, Highlighter creates one ready Case per entity and sends it into the Workflow's steps. See Schedule Daily Cases.

Case Ready Webhook

Release Date: September 2026

Connectors can now subscribe to a Case Ready event, which fires once when a case moves from draft to ready. HTTP Request connectors receive a versioned JSON document describing the case, including its workflow, entities, data sources, latest submission, and file links. Idempotency headers let your endpoint safely ignore repeated deliveries. You can limit the event to particular workflows or workflow orders, and choose which object classes and entity attributes each connector receives. See Case Ready Webhook.

Workflows now have their own UUID, which the webhook reports as workflowId. The Assessment Editor is also available at /assess, and the existing /annotate links still work.

Connector Improvements

Release Date: September 2026

Connectors, which notify external systems when something happens in Highlighter, have been reworked to make them easier to configure and to show what has actually been delivered.

What Changed

  • A simpler form. Choosing a notification type now reveals only the fields it needs, instead of presenting every field for every configuration. Object classes and steps are chosen from searchable lists rather than typed as JSON, and each event's filter appears directly beneath that event.
  • Authenticated webhooks. HTTP Request connectors can send a bearer token. The token is stored encrypted, is never displayed again, and requires an https address — there is no exemption for local endpoints.
  • Send a test notification. A button on the connector page delivers a dummy payload through every enabled notification type and reports the outcome, so a URL, token, or Slack channel can be checked without waiting for a real event.
  • See what happened. The connector page now lists its delivery history with the event, how it was sent, its status, the number of attempts, and any error returned, alongside counts of pending, accepted, retrying, and failed notifications.
  • Better retries. Failures that might succeed later, such as a server error or a rate limit, are retried; failures that cannot succeed, such as a missing endpoint, are reported instead of being retried for days. Transient mail server problems are now retried rather than silently discarded.
  • The UI Path option has been removed from the connector form.

Action Required

HTTP Request connectors now send a JSON body. Previously the request body was form-encoded while its header advertised JSON, which meant numbers and booleans arrived as text and nested values needed special decoding. The body now matches the header:

{"event": "project_file_completed", "payload": {"case_id": 123}}

If you receive Highlighter webhooks, check that your endpoint parses a JSON body before this release reaches your environment.

See Connectors for full details.

Observation Time-Series API

Release Date: August 2026

Highlighter now provides a paginated API for retrieving observation readings directly from observation data sources. Integrations can request a precise time range, filter by data source or measured attribute, and continue safely with an opaque cursor.

See Observations API for the request and response reference.

Box-Select and Bulk Delete in the Assessment Editor

Release Date: July 2026

The assessment editor now supports selecting many items at once and deleting everything else in a couple of clicks.

What Changed

  • One selection, one panel: files, annotations, and entities share a single selection, summarised in the same Selected Items panel used in the Operations Dashboard.
  • Select and Pan tools: with the Select tool active, drag out a box on the canvas to select the annotations it touches, replacing the current selection; hold Shift while starting the drag to add to it instead. Panning the canvas is now the separate Pan tool (the default).
  • Right-click menu: right-clicking the canvas opens a context menu with two bulk actions, also available from the Edit menu:
    • Delete Other Annotations keeps only the selected annotations.
    • Delete Other Entities keeps every annotation belonging to the same entities as the selection.

Both actions ask for confirmation and are undone by a single Ctrl+Z, and nothing is permanently removed until the assessment is submitted. See Working in the Assessment Editor for details.

Deletions also now protect entity-level values: when a deletion would remove every annotation holding a stable attribute value while its entity survives, the confirmation lists each at-risk value so you can keep it by moving it onto a surviving annotation of your choice.

Shadow Entities in the Assessment Editor

Release Date: June 2026

Assessment steps can now hide entities that aren't relevant to the task at hand, letting assessors focus while still keeping useful inferences from earlier stages.

What's New

  • Administrators can enable Shadow Entities on a human assessment step and add Key Attribute rules that define which carried-over entities stay visible. Entities matching no rule are shadowed (hidden on the canvas, and left out of the entities list and timeline).
  • Assessors can hover to reveal a shadowed entity and click to promote its whole entity back into the active set. To shadow an entity, press Shift + S, use the shadow button in the attribute editor header, or use the shadow button on an entity in the entities panel — each shadows the whole entity, and manual shadowing works on any step.
  • Shadowed entities are not saved on submit unless promoted, so they do not carry forward to later stages.

See Human Assessment Steps and Work With Shadow Entities.

Stable Attributes in the Assessment Editor

Release Date: June 2026

Attributes that change only slowly can now be modelled as stable, so Highlighter treats readings that disagree within a short window as conflicts to resolve rather than as real change.

What's New

  • An entity attribute can be given a stability window. Within that window, a stable attribute holds a single value, and conflicting readings are resolved to one value.
  • In the assessment editor, a stable attribute is edited once for the whole entity (across all of its views), always shows the entity's effective value, and marks values set on another view with a "jump to it" link.
  • Stable attributes can be left empty while working; required ones are enforced across the entity at submit time.

See Stable Attributes and Edit Stable Attributes.

Taxon Group Import/Export Performance

Release Date: November 2025

Recent enhancements have significantly improved the speed and efficiency of taxon group imports and exports.

What Changed

The import and export processes have been optimized to use bulk database operations instead of processing records individually. This architectural improvement results in:

  • Faster Import Times: Large taxon groups import up to 10x faster
  • Reduced Server Load: More efficient use of database resources
  • Better Reliability: Improved error handling and transaction management
  • Enhanced Testing: Comprehensive round-trip validation ensures data integrity

Technical Details

The optimization includes:

  1. Bulk Data Operations: CSV parsing and data collection happens outside database transactions for better performance
  2. Efficient Database Queries: Records are created and updated in batches rather than one-by-one
  3. Optimized Lookups: Entity attributes, object classes, and enums are fetched in bulk with indexed lookups
  4. Transaction Optimization: Database locks are minimized while maintaining data consistency

What This Means for You

These improvements are transparent to users - you don't need to change how you work with taxon groups. You'll simply experience:

  • Faster imports when uploading large taxonomy files
  • Quicker exports when backing up or sharing taxonomies
  • More responsive workflow taxonomy management
  • Improved reliability for large-scale taxonomy operations

The same CSV format and workflow remain unchanged, ensuring backward compatibility with existing taxonomy files.

Enhanced Contributor Workflow Management

Release Date: November 19, 2025

We've significantly improved how contributors are assigned and work across different workflow steps, providing a more unified and reliable experience.

What's New

Workflow managers can now manage all types of workflow steps using a consistent interface:

  • Data source
  • Human assessment
  • Machine assessment
  • Filter

This consolidation makes it easier to manage the setup of workflows without having to learn multiple interfaces.

We've also enhanced the technical infrastructure for assigning contributors to workflow steps.

Getting Started

To take advantage of these improvements:

  1. Review Your Workflows: Existing workflows continue to work without changes
  2. Assign Contributors: Use the enhanced assignment interface for new or existing steps
  3. Learn More: See our new Assigning Contributors to Workflow Steps documentation

Stay Updated

For ongoing updates and announcements:

  • Check this page regularly for new feature releases
  • Subscribe to Highlighter platform updates
  • Contact support for questions about new features
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