Assure 9.1 Release Notes

Assure 9.1 enhancements include:

 

Infogix Data3Sixty Integration Improvements

Secure Value Export

Previously, when a data store for Infogix Assure control data or case output
control data was selected for use within Infogix Data3Sixty, any secure text
field value was defined as a simple text field value, and only the masked value
was sent to Infogix Data3Sixty.

Now, with Infogix Data3Sixty support for managing secure field values, Infogix
Assure will define corresponding data store fields as secure fields and send the
actual value of these fields securely to Infogix Data3Sixty. This allows Infogix
Data3Sixty data analysts or case management workers with appropriate
permissions to interact with the true values of secure fields.

Case Output for Results

Previously, Infogix Assure could be configured to send case data corresponding
to selected instances of control data in a capturing or scanning control point to
Infogix Data3Sixty for case management processing.

With release 9.1, Result Action rule administrators may build an action rule
that sends selected results to Infogix Data3Sixty as a data store for case
management processing. A new Case Output action may be added to the set of
actions for a Result Action rule so that those results that meet the Apply-To
criteria of the rule are sent to a new Infogix Data3Sixty case output result data
store. This allows case managers in Infogix Data3Sixty to establish cases and
resolution workflows for these results from Infogix Assure.

 

Data Quality Controls Improvements

Dimension Failure Message

The data quality controls developer can now specify a message for every
quality dimension checked for a data element. On the consistency dimension,
this message can be specified with each consistency rule. The Failed Value
Output report produced by a Measurement control point will include this
message for every failed value that gets reported. This additional output
column can also be exported to Infogix Perceive. The rules analyst can use this
message to indicate what the failure means or even how it should be
researched or resolved by workers viewing the Failed Value Output report.

Measurement Pass/Fail/All Output Files

Data quality measurement control points can now be directed to produce up to
three output files for each execution. These output files contain:

1. The measured data source record with all field values including any
   data source enriched record field values.
2. Information about the record – its counted position within the data
   source, and whether it passed all checks or not.
3. Information about every failed value detected, including everything that
   can be on the Failed Value Output report.

The three output files that can be produced are:

1. The “Passed” file, containing only records that passed all data element
   quality checks.
2. The “Failed” file, containing only records that had one or more data
   elements with a failed quality check.
3. The “All” file, containing both passed and failed records.

The controls developer can set up actions to execute control points of regular
controls, passing any of the files being produced by the measurement control
point. Capturing control points of regular summary, detail or match data
controls can define capture sources of type “Application Measurement Data”,
choosing the data quality measurement control point that produces the file
being captured. This allows the controls developer to do such things as:

• Only capture records of an input source that are known to be valid.
• Perform additional reporting on data quality results.
• Produce results about problems at a record level, which could even
  include sending those results to case output processing for Data3Sixty.
• Produce control data or case output data for the records that have
  failures to control the resolution of the problems detected.

 

Controls Development and Processing Improvements

XML Layout Exclude Locations

Previously, controls developers may have had to work around out of memory
problems when capturing data from very large XML sources. This was necessary
when the controls developer was only interested in some top-level information,
such as might be found on attributes or elements directly subordinate to the
document root element. This occurred because when the XML layout “root
location” is defined as the root element, the system loads information about
all sub elements of that root element into memory. For example, suppose you
have an XML document with a root element “topSubmissionTag”, which
contains some attributes and simple elements, and then a “majorGroupTag”
that may occur several hundred times, and under each of those a
“detailRecordTag” that may occur many thousands of times, with many
record level attributes and elements. When the controls developer specifies a
root location for the XML layout of /topSubmissionTag, the system would
memory load everything in the file, even though the layout might only specify
field definitions for the immediate attributes and simple elements of
“topSubmissionTag”. The workaround was to define a more detailed root
location, such as/topSubmissionTag/majorGroupTag/detailRecordTag, and define the
top level field definitions with locations like ../../@topAttribute1.
Now in release 9.1, the controls developer can specify an exclude location on
the XML layout to completely ignore major parts of the overall document,
reducing memory consumption, improving extraction time, and simplifying
rules development. In this example, an exclude location of
/topSubmissionTag/majorGroupTag would cause the system to avoid the
all of the XML content of the hundreds of “majorGroupTag” elements and
their thousands of “detailRecordTag” elements.

Control Entity Concurrency Scope for Control Points

Previously, control point concurrency options of Detail or Match Data control
entities only applied to that particular control point. For example, if a control
entity had control points CP1 and CP2, and both had a concurrency option of
“Run After”, a new execution of CP1 would only wait for an already running
CP1 to finish; it would not wait for an already running CP2 to finish. Similarly, a
new CP2 execution would only wait for another CP2, and would not wait for
any running CP1.

Now, the concurrency control options for control points can be applied at the
control entity level, instead of the default control point level, by specifying a
Concurrency Scope choice of “Control Entity” on the Details tab of the control
entity. In the above example, a new execution of CP1 would then wait for an
already running CP1 or CP2 to finish. This capability allows the controls
developer to easily prevent errors due to concurrently executing control points
attempting to create or update the same instance of control data. Consider this
feature if you are encountering an error like “#UINU003: The system failed to
update control data record nnn because it was changed by another user or
process after having been read.”

Hadoop HDFS Network I/O

Any layout that supports a Data Access Method of “Networked Character/Byte
Stream I/O” can now specify a protocol of “hdfs://” to access files in a Hadoop
big data “data lake”. This capability allows you to extend the realm of control
for Infogix Assure into the Hadoop file system of the big data processing
environments.

Control Field Descriptions

Each control field in a control entity now has a description. This allows the
controls developer to document the design purpose and expected use of a
control field within the rules themselves, rather than relying on external
documentation.

Runtime Field Descriptions

Each runtime field in a control point or data quality data source now has a
description. This allows the controls developer to document the design purpose
and expected use of a runtime field within the rules themselves, rather than
relying on external documentation.

Work Field Descriptions

Each work field in a capture source or data quality data source now has a
description. This allows the controls developer to document the design purpose
and expected use of the work field within the rules themselves, rather than
relying on external documentation.

Reconciliation Task Descriptions

Each matching task within a reconciliation control point now has a description.
This allows the controls developer to document the design purpose and
expected behavior of the task within the rules themselves, rather than relying
on external documentation.

Extract Rule Comments

The controls developer can add any number of Comment extract rules within
the extraction rules of a capture source. Each comment extract rule is
effectively a single line comment. The controls developer can use these
comment rules to document the capture extraction logic within the rules
themselves in order to improve their maintainability and understandability.

List Processing with Loop Control Extract Rules

A new extract rule called Invoke Procedure Loop can be used to iterate over
lists of primitive values, groups or even sublayouts, applying the extraction
logic defined in a procedure to each occurrence of the data. In addition, a new
extract rule called Exit Extract Rules can be used within the procedures
invoked for the loop in order to skip a loop occurrence or break out of the loop
altogether when a specified condition is met.

Additionally, all work fields with capture sources can now be defined as lists
(occurs many). Previously, only layout data references could be lists.

Together, these new capabilities give the controls developer the same abilities
as in many programming languages to perform loops over lists of values, which
can greatly improve their productivity when they encounter this sort of data.

Runtime Recursive Procedure Conversion

In past releases where controls developers needed to perform list processing in
extraction, they could simulate a loop by having a procedure that includes an
Invoke Procedure extract rule at the bottom that calls the same procedure.
This works for lists of data that aren’t very large, but could sometimes result in
control point execution failures when a list of values was encountered that was
too long.

In this release, the system will detect this sort of “tail recursive” procedure
invocation, and will turn the executable rules into a true loop with the new
Invoke Procedure Loop capability previously described. This prevents these
rules from occasionally failing when a large list of values is encountered. The
actual rules as seen in the user interface remain unchanged.

 

RESTful Infogix Assure Web Services

The Infogix Assure API for control point execution and control point results can
now be invoked using the REST web service call mechanism. The previously
available SOAP web service calls continue to be available. The parameters and
data structures used in the API calls are the same for both types of web service
calls. This provides customers with greater flexibility in their client programs
that invoke Infogix Assure control point processing.

 

Extract Control Data Utility

Infogix Assure now provides a command line utility to extract the control data
of a control entity. You can extract data by time range (control data new or
modified within a range). For match data control entities, you can extract data
by result catalog ID of the execution that produced a particular file of match
data. The extracted data can be output to either a location directly accessible
to the Infogix Assure server. Or, it can be transferred to a location accessible
to the Infogix Assure client if the utility is invoked there. This capability allows
customers to automate the use of control data for external purposes in ways
that previously required the use of Infogix Perceive, Infogix Data3Sixty, or
manual steps to perform one or more extracts of control data using the user
interface.

This capability is a separately licensable feature of Infogix Assure. Contact your
sales associate if you are interested in using this capability.

 

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Support

Infogix Assure now supports SQL Server 2016. During migration, important
columns of control data are converted from DATETIME to DATETIME2 in order to
gain true millisecond precision and ensure correct query results.

 

New Software Supported

• IBM® WebSphere® 9.0.0.4 is supported.
• Microsoft® SQL Server® 2016 is supported.
• Only Java® 8 is supported

Java 8 Support

Only Java 8 is supported for IBM® WebSphere® 8.5.5.x, WebSphere 9.0.0.4,
and WildFly 10.1.0 Application Servers.

Java 7 is no longer supported

Infogix products on release 9.1 support only Java 8 version.

 

WildFly Deployments only Support mod_cluster for Load Balancing

In releases prior to 9.0 that used JBOSS application server, Infogix product
deployments supported mod_jk for load balancing.

However, Infogix releases that support WildFly 10.1.0 application servers
require that you use mod_cluster for load balancing. Load balancing using
mod_jk is no longer supported.

See http://mod-cluster.jboss.org/ for more information about mod_cluster
configuration.

 

Infogix Assure Processes JMS messages from IBM® MQ

Infogix Assure deployments under WildFly 10.1.0® can now be configured to
process JMS messages from IBM MQ.

For information related to process IBM MQ messages, please see the section
titled “Configure IBM MQ using WildFly 10.1.0” within the Advanced
Deployments chapter in the product installation and upgrade guides.

 

Store Product Configuration Files in the Database

Infogix products use several configuration properties to control the behavior of
the products. The configuration properties are stored in files found within the
CONFIG_HOME directory.

The 9.1 release now supports the storage of configuration properties within the
database instead of flat files.

By default, the configuration files are stored in the CONFIG_HOME directory. To
store the configuration files in a database table instead of the filesystem, set
the value of ENABLE_DATABASE_CONFIG property to true in the
advanced.appserver.properties file.

You can modify the values of these properties from the Infogix Administrative
Console’s “Product Configuration” link. Any updates to the product properties
take immediate effect, and eliminates the need for a server administrator to
run update-config.bat (.sh) script.

Note: For Infogix ER only, do not enable the feature to store the properties in
the database if you use custom plugins.

 

Enhancements to Embedded Directory Deployments

Infogix supports product deployments using Embedded Directory, where the
management of users accessing the products is managed within the product.

Several security, audit and reporting enhancements have been added to
Embedded Directory deployments in this release.

 

Show Users “Created Date” and “Last Login” Information

Directory Administrators and Superusers can now visually view when a user id
was created in the system. Information about the users’ last logged in date and
time is also displayed. Go to Security -> Users page to view the users’ “Created
Date” and “Last Login” information.

This capability enables the administrators to easily identify unused or outdated
accounts for maintenance and compliance purposes.

 

Enable Users to Reset their Passwords

In prior releases, embedded directory users did not have the ability to reset
their forgotten password. They had to contact Directory Administrators or
Superusers to reset their password. Users now have the ability to reset their
forgotten password. From the product login page, click “Forgot Password?”
link. Enter your user id and its associated email address. An email with a link to
reset your password is sent to the registered email address. Appropriate error
messages are displayed when the information specified does not match the
actual information in the database.

 

Infogix Administrative Console Improvements

The administrative console enables users to gather and provide information to
Infogix Customer Support for use in troubleshooting run-time problems.

View Log Files in Real-time

In prior releases, users did not have the ability to view the contents of the log
files in real-time. From the Infogix Administrative Console, select “Config/Log
Files” link. Select a log file, click “View File”. In the log viewer screen, click
“Enable Running Log” to view the contents of the logs in real-time.

Update Product Licenses

You can now update the product license from the Infogix Administrative
Console if you have enabled the feature to store the product configuration
properties in the database (ENABLE_DATABASE_CONFIG=true).

Contact Infogix Customer Support to get an updated license file upon license
expiration or product renewal.

From the Infogix Administrative Console, select “Update License” link.
Select “Choose File”, and browse to select the updated license file.
Select “Update” to apply the licensing updates.