Transact Manager 18.05

What's New in 18.05

While TM 18.05 is the first release to introduce the System Event Publisher which is a powerful feature and enable customers to receive near real time event information from TM, the main focus of the release had been to improve the Quality, Security and Supportability of the product. There have been a number of significant changes to the build process for TM and this had enabled us to incorporate better tools into the build process to help scan for vulnerabilities and from this we have updated a number of third party libraries to use the latest versions. This is going to be a ongoing activity with more progress being made to update libraries over the next major TM release.

Key Features

System Event Publisher

Want to receive real time event information from TM to enable external systems to monitor transaction flow? TM 18.05 introduces the System Event Publisher to connect external systems through an AWS SQS queue, in near real time, where the messages can be picked to provide up to date information about the states of form transactions in TM.

Event messages can be sent based on changes to the following objects:

• Collaboration Jobs
• Form Transactions (including data extracts, properties, milestones, groovy logs, error logs, event logs and request logs)
• Security Audit Logs
• System Health

The System Event Publisher hooks into TM’s transaction processing engine, records events in memory and sends the event to the queue in the background to maintain end user performance.

When building connected systems the scope for this feature is large, some examples of its use are:

• Feed data into customer help desk system to present a unified view of the end users journey to improve the levels of support that can be offered
• Feed data about the transaction flow and logs into fraud detection systems
• Capturing integration errors in Groovy Service Logs and feeding these through the System Event Publisher into an external monitoring system enables you to build system to alert when critical integration points fail. 

Security Enhancements

Upgrades to various third party libraries undertaken in 18.05 to make sure TM has the latest updates, Including:

• Apache Groovy Lang 2.4.15
• Eclipse BIRT Runtime 4.6.0
• JDBC Database Drivers (MySql, Oracle and SQL Server)
• JUnit 4.12
• Oracle Java JDK 1.8u172

From the above list it is worth highlighting the Groovy Lang update to 2.4.15. From past experience updates to these components can have affect on Groovy Scripts running with in TM. These changes are necessary to keep the system secure as these updates include numerous security enhancements. With this release any Groovy Scripts need to be tested against the platform to ensure they still work as expected. 

Support for new Insights Features

Transact 18.05 adds support for new Insights features, if you want to use these then this is a important release for you.

• Centrally stored ECCL Script
• Fluent API to send Insights Segments from server side Groovy Scripts

Fluent API Additions

Each TM release includes additions to the Fluent API set while coverage of this API grows, 18.05 is no different and includes the following additions to the Fluent API to:

For more information on the above please see the Fluent API Javadoc available from the TM Services menu or from which the Transact SDK.

Key Improvements and Behavioral Changes

Transaction Abandonment and Data Purging

It is very important that draft transactions are closed down to enable Personally Identifying Information (PII) data to be purged to ensure it is not held in the system for longer than necessary. In TM 18.05 we have reviewed the lifetime of transactions in a number of states and made some update to make these more consistent. The main areas of change is in relation to task abandonment where it was found that task had the potential to stay in the system indefinitely when expiry times were not set and these tasks will abandon based in the DR settings for standard Saved Transactions.

Release Details

Downloads