Assure 8.1 Release Notes

Assure 8.1 enhancements include:

Memory and Process Viewer

Infogix Assure logging and record keeping is enhanced to work with the new platform Memory and Process Viewer within the administrative console. This tool provides a view into either the running system or the data enclosed within a support package produced by the administrative console at some point in the past. The view shows a paginated 12-hour window of running processes and memory usage. You can double click a process execution bar in the Gantt-chart like view, and view the log output for that process.

Layout Path/URL Specifications Report

This report lists the default Path/URL values for all selected types of layouts for which the user has view permission. For database layouts, the default Path/URL is either the JDBC URL or the JNDI Datasource name. Optionally, the report also includes the capture source level use of the layouts listed, along with any overridden Path/URL specification at that source.

A rules administrator for Infogix Assure might use this report to assess whether there are any deployment specific specifications that are potential problems prior to exporting controls, or perhaps after importing controls into a different deployment, such as when moving controls from “development” to “QA”.

ACR/Summary History Data Usage Report

This Infogix Assure report lists all history data usage for ACR/Summary values via ACR/Connector. The report lists the ACR/Connector platform information; the ACR/Summary items referenced (Job Name, Step Name, Qualifier, Item number); and the control that defines the use (Control Entity, Control Point, history data name).

A rules administrator for Infogix Assure might use this report to determine which controls need changes based upon information received about ACR/Summary rules changes that are being implemented.

Rules Reporting

The system includes this new reporting capability under the Rules menu to users in the rules writing or rules viewing roles (Integrity Rule Admin or Rule Viewer). The system provides the following new reports that consolidate information from many rules.

EDI Data Access

You can now define EDI X.12 layouts as a source for data capture or data quality measurement. This new capability is a separately licensed feature within Infogix Assure.

Control Point Execution Actions with Applications

You can now define execute actions from data quality application control points. Application control points can execute control points on regular control entities, and regular control entities can execute control points on applications.

Data Quality Application Duplication

You can now create a new data quality Application control by duplicating an existing Application.

New and Enhanced Functions: @text, @date, @isnum, @number, @number2

The text, date, isnum, number and number2 functions are enhanced to allow the specification of negative values for the position argument. Negative position values are treated as offsets from the end of the text. Positive position values are still treated as a one-based index from the beginning of the text.

Oracle Bulk Loader Environment Setting

Infogix applications now rely on retrieving the value of ORACLE_HOME from Infogix properties file instead of getting it from environment settings.

This new property eliminates issues with Oracle environment variables where it is not set correctly or when the applications are started using a profile that doesn’t have these settings. In past releases, to enable the correct settings required customers to restart the servers; this often required the involvement of an administrator.

A new property, ORACLE_HOME, is now added in the database properties file. You need to specify the path where the Oracle client software is installed.

Infogix Administrative Console: Process & Memory Viewer

The Process & Memory Viewer displays processes that were executed, or are currently running on your system for the selected time interval. System activity information for each node is collected and graphically represented.

For Infogix Assure only, Control Point executions are shown in the Process section.

Multiple Group to Role Mapping

This feature allows multiple roles to be mapped to an Infogix role through the product properties files.

Resource Creation at Cluster Level

Resources like Queues, Connection Factories, and Service Integration Buses are now created at the cluster level in WebSphere. This simplifies the installation process, especially when Infogix applications are deployed manually from the WebSphere administrative console.

Infogix Administrative Console: Diagnostic Package includes Installation Properties

The installation properties like, the appserver.properties, appserver.advanced.properties, database.properties, database.advanced.properties, and the product.properties, are now bundled within the diagnostic package.

Any password related properties are removed during the creation of the diagnostic package.

JBoss Data Source Configuration

In prior releases, it was difficult to manage data sources in JBoss. Users had to edit or create a new <data_source_name>–ds.xml and restart the JVM to pick up the changes. Managing these data source files involved manual steps as these file are removed after running clean.bat (.sh) or deploy.bat (.sh) scripts.

In this release, the configuration of data sources has been simplified in JBoss. You can now define the details of the data source in the properties file: Infogix/config/default/${product}/datasources.properties.

The configuration file also supports password encryption. The command update-datasources.bat (.sh) can be run to deploy data sources to JBoss.

JBoss Single Sign On Support

In prior releases, it was not possible to seamlessly access different Infogix applications. Users now can navigate between Infogix applications without having to provide their login credentials in JBoss. For example, visiting a Control Point Result from Infogix Insight to Infogix Assure does not require re-authentication.

JBoss single sign on ability is limited to Infogix products only, and does not provide ability to integrate with other enterprise applications.

Active Directory Nested LDAP Group Support

Active Directory® is a directory service that stores information about objects on a network and makes this information available to users and network administrators. Organizations may sometimes create nested groups to reflect their organizational structure. Nested groups can have groups as members.

Infogix applications now support the retrieval of users from nested groups. This feature allows customers deploying Infogix applications in WebSphere or JBoss to access user information from nested groups. This eliminates the need to flatten a nested group hierarchy to support Infogix applications.

Cluster Communication Enhancements

Several enhancements have been made to Infogix applications in the areas of cluster communication and discovery. This eliminates the need to enable multicast protocols in your environment to communicate and discover other cluster members. In prior releases, cluster communication and cluster discovery was based on UDP and JGroups ping protocols.

Starting with this release, applications use tcp and fileping for cluster communication and discovery, respectively. These protocols are more reliable for delivery of information as compared to UDP and ping options.

The options, “tcp” and “fileping” are now the default values.

These values are specified for the following properties in appserver.advanced.properties file:

• CLUSTER_DISCOVERY_PROTOCOL=fileping
• CLUSTER_TRANSPORT_PROTOCOL=tcp

Integration Framework Changes

Several fixes were made within Integration Framework to support web services within the IBM Application Server. The Integration Framework now uses standard Java Web services that are bundled with the JDK. Infogix Assure web services are available from both the IBM and JBoss administrative consoles.