🚀 Opendock – April 2026 Release Notes

April was a significant month for Gate and Scheduling improvements, with a strong theme of closing the loop on carrier workflows and hardening data integrity across the platform. We shipped major BOL management capabilities, expanded SmartGate vehicle support, tightened unit limiter behavior for rescheduling, and addressed several high-priority security vulnerabilities. Under the hood, a substantial amount of platform work landed to improve search performance, data hygiene, and system reliability.

🏗️ What's New

Features and enhancements are organized by the three core areas of the Opendock platform. Each update includes what changed, the problem it solves, the value it adds, and where to find it.

🚪 Gate

Unplanned Check-In Email Notifications

What changed
Warehouses can now opt in to receive email notifications when an unplanned (walk-in) check-in occurs at the gate. This is controlled via a new warehouse setting under Gate Management.

Problem it solves
Warehouse teams had no reliable way to be alerted when a driver arrived without a scheduled appointment. Unplanned arrivals could go unnoticed until someone manually checked the Gate Feed.

Value it adds
Operations teams stay ahead of surprise arrivals — reducing wait times for drivers and ensuring gate staff are notified in real time, even if they're not actively watching the screen.

Where to access
Opendock Portal → Warehouse Settings → Gate Management → Unplanned Check-In Notifications

Carrier Self Check-Out Fully Released to All Users

What changed
Carrier self check-out is now available by default for all warehouses with Gate Management enabled. The feature flag that previously controlled rollout has been removed.

Problem it solves
Gate operators were required to manually close out every visit, creating a bottleneck at busy docks where staff are managing multiple trucks simultaneously.

Value it adds
Drivers complete their own check-out, freeing gate staff to focus on incoming traffic. The result is a faster dock exit process with fewer manual steps and no setup required.

Where to access
Opendock Portal → Gate Management Settings → Check-Out

The check-out QR code is now visible by default when Gate Management is enabled.

AI Gate Feed: Appointment Number Linked to Asset

What changed
The AI Gate Feed now surfaces the appointment confirmation number associated with each Asset entering your Yard directly in the AI gate feed.

Problem it solves
Gate operators had to cross-reference the Gate Feed with the appointment schedule separately to identify which appointment a given vehicle was linked to. This added friction during high-volume check-in windows.

Value it adds
Operators can immediately see which appointment a driver is connected to without leaving the Gate Feed, making it faster to verify arrivals and respond to discrepancies.

Where to access
Opendock Portal → Gate Feed

🏭 Yard

Yard Tasks Now Sort by Deadline

What changed
Yard tasks are now sorted by deadline/due date by default, so drivers and operators always see the most urgent tasks first.

Problem it solves
Without a defined sort order, drivers were presented with tasks in an arbitrary sequence, making it hard to prioritize and potentially causing time-sensitive tasks to be missed.

Value it adds
Drivers focus on what matters most without having to interpret a disorganized task list. This directly reduces the risk of SLA breaches on time-sensitive yard moves.

Where to access
Opendock Yard Tasks App and Nova.

Yard Tasks App: PWA Install Banner

What changed
The Yard Tasks app (Circe) now prompts users to install it as a Progressive Web App (PWA) on both Android and iOS devices.

Problem it solves
Many drivers and yard workers were accessing the Yard Tasks app through a mobile browser, which is less less convenient than a native app experience — especially in low-connectivity environments.

Value it adds
Drivers can install the Yard Tasks app directly to their home screen for faster access, a cleaner interface, and better offline resilience. The install banner is dismissible and only shown once every 30 days.

Where to access
Circe (Yard Tasks App) — available via the banner prompt on Android/Chrome and iOS Safari

📅 Scheduling

Unit Limiter: Reschedule Now Respects Limits & Shows Unavailable Dates

What changed
When rescheduling an appointment — either by dragging on the grid or using the Reschedule button — the system now validates unit and appointment limits for the destination date. Dates that would breach a limit are shown as unavailable in the calendar picker.

Problem it solves
Previously, rescheduling bypassed unit and appointment limit enforcement, allowing appointments to be moved to already-full days. This undermined the purpose of setting capacity limits and caused silent overbooking.

Value it adds
Warehouse managers can trust that their capacity controls hold, even when appointments are moved around. Schedulers see exactly which dates are available at a glance, reducing errors and back-and-forth with carriers.

Where to access
Opendock Portal → Appointments → Reschedule (also enforced via the scheduling grid drag-and-drop)

Unit Limiter: Counts Update When Dock or Load Type Changes

What changed
Changing the dock or load type on an existing appointment now correctly updates unit and appointment counts across all relevant aggregations (per dock, per load type, per date).

Problem it solves
Updating an appointment's dock or load type was not previously treated as a rescheduling event, so capacity counts would drift out of sync — showing incorrect availability and undermining limit enforcement.

Value it adds
Capacity data stays accurate when appointment details are modified, giving ops teams reliable numbers for planning and preventing accidental overbooking caused by stale counts.

Where to access
Opendock Portal → Appointments → Edit Appointment

Unit Limiter Now Supports Inbound/Outbound Load Types

What changed
The Unit Limiter settings page now allows warehouses to configure unit limits for Inbound/Outbound load types, in addition to the existing Inbound-only option.

Problem it solves
Warehouses handling combined inbound/outbound loads (e.g., cross-dock operations) had no way to apply unit-based capacity limits to those appointment types.

Value it adds
Complete capacity control for mixed-load warehouses — unit limits now cover all the load types you actually use.

Where to access
Opendock Portal → Warehouse Settings → Unit Limiter → Load Type

⚙️ General Improvements

• Carrier Search Performance: The carrier lookup dropdown now requires a minimum of 3 characters before triggering a server-side search, and the debounce time has been increased. This significantly reduces database load during high-traffic periods.

• Appointment Requirements API — Improved Example Values: The /appointment-requirements endpoint no longer includes fabricated or misleading example values for optional fields. (API users: if your integration relies on example values from this endpoint, review this change — the response format is unchanged but example data is now more accurate.)

• Developer Portal Cleanup: Internal-only roles (role_god, role_internal) have been removed from API documentation to reduce confusion for external integration builders.

• International Support — El Salvador: Opendock now supports warehouse creation in El Salvador, including local phone number formats, timezone support, and Google-validated address lookup.Elasticsearch Stability: Resolved issues causing appointment search failures and crashes. The Logstash polling interval was increased from 30 seconds to 5 minutes — reducing write pressure on the search cluster by ~90%. Search data may lag up to 5 minutes, which is acceptable for all typical search use cases.

• YMS Freeze Fix: Resolved a bug where the Yard Management System would freeze when viewing asset details, sometimes causing assets to be unintentionally removed from the yard.

🐛 Bug Fixes & Stability

• OD-3463 [Scheduling]: Fixed a bug where appointment updates could proceed even after failing external validation, potentially resulting in appointments with an invalid time span (start time after end time).

• OD-3461 [Scheduling]: Fixed incorrect unit limit counts after rescheduling — the old appointment day's count was not being decremented, leading to inflated capacity numbers. (Note: historical counts affected prior to this fix will not be automatically backfilled.)

• OD-3436 [Reporting]: Fixed multi-document custom field values being exported as incomplete storage paths instead of full downloadable URLs in appointment Excel exports.

• OD-3428 [Permissions]: Fixed generalized permission errors affecting Operator-role users, preventing them from creating appointments, adding partials, or seeing Check-In Area fields.

• OD-3406 [Scheduling]: Fixed a bug allowing carrier users to create appointments with a null userId, bypassing carrier assignment enforcement and producing carrier-less appointments in reporting.

• OD-3389 [API]: Fixed a 500 error returned by the /appointment-requirements endpoint when org.settings or warehouse.settings was null.

• OD-3364 [Yard]: Fixed YMS freezing and asset details not displaying correctly when clicking the asset icon, which in some cases caused assets to be removed from the yard.

• OD-3350 [Scheduling]: Fixed incorrect date shown in the Unit Limiter drawer for warehouses in timezones that differ significantly from the user's local time.

• OD-3351 [Gate]: Fixed the carrier dropdown during check-in appearing at the bottom of the screen on iOS Safari instead of below the input field.

• OD-3319 [Settings]: Fixed a foreign key constraint error when unlinking load types from custom forms that had associated appointment data.

• OD-3440 [Gate]: Fixed the Gate Feed clearing the warehouse selection when the dropdown was opened for organizations with more than 10 warehouses.

• OD-3420 [Yard]: Fixed missing translations for license plate and DOT number labels in the Asset Visit presenter.

• OD-2907 [Platform]: Resolved flaky end-to-end tests in the unit limit update suite, improving CI/CD pipeline reliability.

📊 What This Means for You

April's updates make Opendock more complete, more reliable, and more secure:

• Carrier self check-out is universal → every Gate Management warehouse now has it enabled, with no setup required.

• Unit limits hold during rescheduling → capacity controls are now enforced end-to-end, including drag-and-drop and dock/load type changes.

• Search is faster and more stable → Elasticsearch improvements reduce latency and cluster overhead for ops teams managing high appointment volumes.