Cylindo’s 360 Viewer version 4 is a major upgrade of our Viewer, which requires that you actively upgrade. The good news is that we have added a lot of great new features and significantly improved the overall usability of the API from the developers standpoint. When you are planning to upgrade from Viewer version 3.x to Viewer 4, this guide will help you through the process and call out some of the most common changes you need to be aware of.
How to upgrade
Step 1:
To upgrade to Viewer 4, you need to update the script path and the stylesheet. The files that needs to be included in your page header should look like the example below:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="https://viewer.cylindo.com/v4/viewer.min.css">
<script src="https://viewer.cylindo.com/v4/viewer.min.js"></script>
Step 2:
Verify and QA that the Viewer works and looks as you expect on the product pages where it’s used.
Note: For Viewer 4 to be compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Level AA we had to make breaking changes to the stylesheet. If you have made modifications to or have replaced the default Viewer stylesheet, make sure to validate that Viewer 4 is not breaking your implementation when you update.
If you have any questions, please contact your Customer Support representative.
Cached content
Approx. 70% of all Viewer requests are handled by our CDN. When upgrading to Viewer 4 the content will be cached on our CDN (Amazon Cloudfront) again. This might cause some of your content to take slightly longer to load the first time you open a page with the 360 HD Viewer.
Resources
360 HD Viewer - What’s new?
Viewer 4 comes with a wide range of speed and functionality improvements. The most important updates are:
- Google Analytics and GTM integration
Viewer 4 can be set up to push events to Google Analytics in less than 10 minutes. You can integrate via Google Tag Manager or push events directly to Google Analytics (analyics.js). Cylindo has made a couple of template dashboards available so you can easily see how your products with Cylindo-powered visuals perform vs. your other products.
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) level AA conformance
Cylindo’s 360 HD Viewer now supports conformance level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. WCAG are a series of guidelines for improving web accessibility for all users.
- Alternate content as first frame
If you have non-Cylindo content that you want to introduce in the 360 Viewer, you can now also choose to use them as the first frame or in any order of the thumbnails as you like.
- New image manipulation parameters
Now, there are multiple new ways to adjust the images you display in the Viewer. For example, you can adjust size, remove environment shadow, or specify the zoom experience you want for your products.
- New options for specifying product configurations
The 360 Viewer now supports the option to request a default configuration of a product or a specific configuration of the product using a unique ID (Configuration Alias) instead of specifying the array of features and options you want.
For the full list of new features and changes, please see our Viewer changelog.
Content API - What’s new?
Together with Viewer 4, we are releasing a major overhaul to our Content API. The most important updates are:
- Content returned with a single request
In our Content API v1, you first had to request the URL to the content and make an additional request to fetch the image files. In Content API v2, we have removed this complexity and return the content (images/3D files) when you make a valid request.
- Same parameters for all content types
Cylindo’s content API v2 is a massive improvement over our v1. You can request images and 3D files (GLB, USDZ) with the same parameters.
- Check if products and configurations are available on Cylindo
With the new configuration function, you can check if a product is available on Cylindo and which features and options it’s available in.
- Developer experience
Our new Content API provides your developers with easy to understand error messages and information, which makes it easy to set up and maintain the integration.
Deprecated and removed functions and properties
With Viewer 4, we also are deprecating a few functions and properties where we have very low usage and have introduced better alternatives. For a complete overview, please see our documentation for deprecated functions and properties.
All functions and properties will work with Viewer 4, but they will be removed when Viewer 5 gets released. We recommend you update your implementation if you use any of the deprecated functions or properties.
The properties alternateImages and threeSixty were deprecated when version 3 of the 360 Viewer was released and is now removed.