IMan v4.1 changes

Upgrade Notice

If you are upgrading from v3.2 or earlier, you need to familiarise yourself with the V4.x Upgrade Process & Notes to note the possible breaking changes and to help plan your upgrades. We've tried to streamline this as much as possible by maintaining backwards compatibility.

License Change Notice

Per previous email notices this upgrade changes the 'Unlimited' license.

Please consult the following notification for further information.

For test licenses please consult the upgrade notice.

User Interface & Usuability Improvements

Preview

On our release the preview grid was pretty revolutionary, but it has had no changes since.

In V4.1 the Preview area has undergone a major rework.

The preview area now auto-refreshes – just one Refresh click.

Preview in action

In testing and on a couple of test sites I have to say this is so, so good! It makes design quick.

In addition the new grid control is more responsive to expanding child transactions.

Other UI Improvements

  • General performance improvements across the UI, making the Transform UIs snappier.
  • Modernisation of several controls used across IMan.
  • More area for Script Expressions – The Script box can now be resized and the font is now of a fixed width, making it easier to read.

Webservice Improvements

Form URL Writer

We’ve introduced a new writer transform which provides the ability to integrate with webservices which require values to passed to it in key value pairs as parameters to the URL or as a set of body encoded parameters.

Request Paging

Extensive capabilities to ‘page’ through data on Readers, providing the ability to consume data from a webservice needing several requests (pages) to obtain the full dataset. IMan supports three common types of paging:

  • URL - Parameters in the request determine the page of data for a request to return.
  • Body - Parameters to determine the page of data to return are passed in the body of a request supported in both Xml and JSON formats.
  • Response - When a service responds with the first page of data, a url to the next page of data is included in the response.

Rewrite (HTTP) Write Response

Textual and binary responses from write operations (POST, PUT, etc) can be consumed and written back onto the IMan dataset.

For example, a webservice will return a response with the document(s) created/updated. This response (or elements of) such as a document number or id, can be written back.

Improved JSON Document Query Capabilities

Allowing more complex elements of JSON data to be queried.

Introduced in this version is the ability to query child collections using the index of the child. E.g. child[2] will return the second child.

See JPath for examples on how to query JSON.

Extended Authorisation Capabilities

Additional capabilities on request headers have been added to the Basic Authentication to allow integration with wider range of webservices.

Webservices Cookbook & Improved Documentation

We've added an extensive set of short step-by-step articles in our Webservice Cookbook - Introduction to help you start integrating webservices.

We've also expanded the breadth of documentation in relation to all aspects for webservices.

Simplified Installation

The new installer simplifies the installation process removing the need to manually add missing windows pre-requisites and to creating the IIS Application Pool.

Connector Readers

Pull Connectors such as SageCRM, Salesforce, Magento now have the ability to deselect the transaction types from being imported. This improvement greatly simplifies integration of connectors such as Salesforce, as it allows you to remove unwanted transaction types from the IMan dataset.

Continued Performance Improvements

Continued performance improvements across IMan especially across the CSV, Fixed Width & JSON writers.

Writer Improvements

  • Ability to specify field headers on the CSV, Excel & Fixed Width writers; this rounds out the functionality made to the other writers.
  • CSV Writer now has three options to escape string data: no escaping, escape and quote fields and escape and do not quote fields.

Function Enhancements

  • Write out binary fields to a binary file using the WriteBinaryValue function – Particularly useful for integrating shipping type webservices producing labels.

Connector Updates

Sage300

  • Ability to append to existing A/R Receipt batches when creating prepayments in O/E Order, Shipments, Invoices; much needed for eCommerce integrations.
    • The new "Append Prepayment To Existing Batch" field allows you to specify to an open A/R Receipt batch by: Batch Per Day; Batch Per Day By Bank; Batch By Batch Description; Batch By Bank.
  • Ability to delete empty or erroneous batches for A/R Invoices, A/R Receipts, A/P Invoices, A/P Payments & G/L Batches.
    • The new "Delete Empty/Erroneous Batch" field allows you to specify whether to delete the batch if there's an error or when the created batch is empty.
  • Ability to post A/R Receipt and A/P Payment batches.
  • New imports for Orchid Bin Tracking Transfers and P/O Requisitions.

SageCRM

  • Ability to connect over HTTPS connections.
  • Compatibility with 2019.

Sage EM

  • Ability to connect over HTTPS connections.

Compatibility

  • Ability to run IMan with on an HTTPS connection.
  • Compatibility with SQL 2017 & SQL 2019.
  • Compatibillity with Windows 2019.

Previous Updates

Need to see how IMan has evolved? Check the links below.