Journey Manager 18.11

What's New in 18.11

The key driver for TM 18.11 is to add support for the Transact Workspaces spaces development and to support this a new Workspaces API has been built. This is Swagger restful API which supports queries & updates and also includes paging facilities.

The TM 18.11 release also includes significant form initialization performance improvements for large forms (see Maestro Static Content Externalization below).

This release also includes support for Open JDK 11 and Wildfly 14 which puts TM on a long term support branch for Java and also benefits from a number of updates to dependent libraries and also a number of core java security enhancements. The Open JDK 11 has useful performance improvements for high throughput workloads with improved memory management and new parallel GC1 garbage collector. This JDK also supports searchable Javadoc in the Transact SDK distribution.

Key Features

Workspace API

The Workspace API is new TM REST API to support the development of rich UI experiences for ‘Back of House’ staff who are supporting complex workflows and providing help desk functions to end users. The API utilities Swagger and is secured using Spring Security. Primarily provides access to information relating to Transactions & Jobs but also serves system meta data to support the workspace operations.

The REST API is a supported interface to set the contract for how a Space interacts with TM. A stable interface will simplify platform upgrades in the future.

Support Queries for:

1. Txn
2. Job
3. Space
4. User/Current User
5. Organizations
6. Groups
7. Forms
8. Categories
9. Extract & Property Names

Supports Updates to:

1. Txn & Job Comments
2. Current User Preferences and Profiles
3. Cancel, Reopen, Assign and Unassign transactions/tasks

Maestro Form - Static Content Externalization (SCE)

Transact Manager now includes a new Maestro Form rendering mode which significantly reduces the time it takes to load large forms. This is important as long application loading times can significantly increase the bounce rate with users simply closing the browser window before starting the application.

Using the new Maestro SCE Mode rendering option, TM will externalized 85-95% of the Maestro HTML form content which can then be served in parallel by Content Distribution Networks (CDNs). This substantially reduces the amount of time it takes a form to initialize as the initial HTML page is downloaded very quickly and the larger static JSON and JS content can be downloaded in parallel by separate browser threads. By serving this static content out of CDN's they are much more likely to be close to the users device reducing the network latency and this content can also be cached by the users browser.

For large Maestro applications we have see a 2x reduction in form load times.

For the TM sever there area also benefits, and under performance load tests we have observed a 20% throughput improvement with this option enabled.

The Maestro Static Content Externalization (SCE) mode works with older Maestro Release forms and does not require any changes to the Maestro forms to use it.

Maestro SCE Mode is a opt in feature and can be enabled on a system by setting the 'Maestro SCE Mode' check box on the 'Composer Render HTML Form' service.

Additions System Event Publisher (SEP) Feed

The System Event Publisher (SEP) feed now supports:

1. New User Authentication Event feed to send user login events, https://docs.avoka.com/SystemEventPublisher/UserAuthenticationEventSEP.htm
2. Includes scheduled purge time and actual purge time for a transaction, https://docs.avoka.com/SystemEventPublisher/SubmissionEventSEP.htm

Security Enhancements & Library Upgrades

• Add Validation of date field to the workspace portal to fix internal error when provided date is invalid, TMR-1422
• Enhance security around service connection password in the manager UI, TMR-138
• Remove confirmation page and receipting from the Server Monitor Form configuration, TMR-1613

Upgrades to various third party libraries undertaken in 18.11 to make sure TM has the latest updates, Including:

• TM now uses Open JDK 11
• User Agent Utils upgraded to 1.21
• Spring Framework upgraded to 4.3.19
• Spring Security upgraded to 43.1.7
• Bouncycastle upgraded to 1.60
• Remove JLine library from TM and upgrade SDK version to 3.9
• Upgrade org.apache.xmlgraphics batik to 1.10

Platform Support Enhancements

TM now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2017 database and Microsoft Windows Server 2016 operation system.

Behavior Changes & Removed Features

The following are possible behavior changes to be aware of:

• Defect TMR-1343 : It was identified that the MockEntityService did not correctly initialize the job graph state. The fix for this will possible change behavior for test cased which use MockEntityService.createJobInProgress.
• Feature TMR-1575 : The use of the existing field task_created_timestamp field has been expanded for use for standard transactions as well and will now be populated when any transaction is created. This is externalized through the Workspace API as timeCreated. There is a small behavioral change here if this field is used to infer a transaction is a task, i.e. Groovy query checking the task_created_timestamp field but not also checking the transaction is actually a task by checking the task key.
• Feature TMR-1574 : A maximum time period restriction on the purge process duration when running within the transaction processor has been added this default to 150 seconds. For systems which have long running data retention this setting may need attention.
• FeatureTMR-1593 : Controls have been added to manage the lifetime of the submission property and extract search cache, this allows control of the size of the search data sets for these searches, the default for system upgrades will maintain previous behavior but for new systems the search data will be purged on delivery. This setting re-enforces that TM is not a system of record and management of transactions once they have been delivered should be handled outside of TM and hence delivered transactions will not be searchable in TM.

The following are features that have been removed from TM in 18.11:

• FopRenderReceiptService receipt render service & org.apache.xmlgraphics library
• Use of Flash in the Manager UI
• Apache Camel Support for Groovy Services

Fluent API Additions

Each TM release includes additions to the Fluent API set while coverage of this API grows, 18.11 is no different and includes updated to the Fluent API.

These API additions should introduce no compatibility issues with the services developed for the previous version.

The following table is a summary of the updated Fluent API.

This link contains a JDiff of the changed to the interface between version 18.05 and 18.11, Fluent API Changes 18.05-18.11.zip

For more information on the above please see the Fluent API Javadoc available in the Transact SDK or under TM Services menu 'Fluent API Javadoc'.

Release Details

Downloads