IMan v4.2 New Features and Improvements

The latest of version introduces the following new features and improvements:

Major usability improvements to both the designer and the transform setup screens. We expect these two changes will greatly increase your productivity.
Webservices functionality has again been increased with better HTTP header support, increased request paging options, parameterised URLs on Read requests, improved response handling & improved logging.
Small improvements to the CSV Reader & File Task.
Lookup Tables - Have undergone a much needed cleanup and several enhancements.
Salesforce - We now bundle (no, it's not free) the Salesforce connector with IMan.
- Handle hierarchical writes, vast performance improvements and better documentation.
- Sample integrations are included with supporting step-by-step guides for Sage200 and Sage300.
Goodbye Internet Explorer!

The Boring, but Necessary Stuff

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 releases and notices this upgrade changes the 'Unlimited' license.

Please consult the following notification for further information.

For test licenses please consult the upgrade notice.

New Designer

The design component has been refreshed, resulting in a much more friendly experience.

Vast performance improvements, making everything more responsive.
Ability to self-document your integrations with shad-able regions and your own annotations.
Transform Comments are now dynamically shown when hovering over a transform.
Much better support for larger integrations; you can now scroll and zoom.
Relaxation of rules around joining of existing some transforms. This is a continuing piece of work; future product updates will further add to this.

Resizeable Panes

The other big UI change is the vertical pane in the transform setup & schedule screen can now be moved left and right, giving more screen real-estate for previewing data and schedule results.

Most of the screens also respond to the pane re-size so elements on the left hand (options, field mapping grids, auditing setup) will shrink and grow accordingly.

Webservice Improvements

Numerous small and large improvements have been made to the webservice capabilities. The aim of these improvements is to both increase the breadth of services IMan can integrate with whilst also making life a little easier.

Http Headers

In this version we've added the ability to define HTTP headers to be sent on each request. In previous versions headers could only be configured on the Basic & OAuth Authentication setups.

This version extends header capabilities allowing headers to be defined on the authentication in addition to the Webservice Behaviour and each request (Reader, Writer & Lookup). The Writer and Lookup headers further expand capabilities as they can be parameterised via Expando fields.

The header setup control (as shown below) makes the Basic Authentication setup a little more intuitive, particularly configurations requiring additional headers.

Evaluate URL

The URL can now be evaluated using a valid VB Script expression. In addition the last successful integration run date/time can be accessed through a parameter (SYS.LASTRUNDATE).

This is especially useful for querying webservices where one of the parameters requires a date/time e.g. a last extracted date, a created date, etc.

Request Paging

Several enhancements have been made to paging:

A new HTTP Header Link paging method has been added. This is primarily to be compatible with Shopify's paging method, but can be used with other webservices.
Improved paging support on the Webservice Lookups! This improved functionality has the dual affect of improving performance through caching.
New Response Status Code Handling - An edge case, but IMan now has the ability to designate an Http Status code as the end of pages (as opposed to just an empty dataset).

Keyed Rewrite Write Response

Version 4.1 introduced the ability to consume both binary and textual responses from from write requests (POST, PUT, PATCH, etc).

This release expands the ability to handle textual responses where the response of the data is not in the sequence it was written. For example, a batch of customer records is written to a service, but the responses are in reverse sequence. This new capability ensures the responses can be written back to the correct transaction in IMan.

Usability and Bug Fixes - Fixes to the job security selection; the enabled checkbox is now named correctly; the order of the fields is now laid out in a logical manner.
Styling Improvements - New tab control and general improvement of the look and feel.
Check Box Type Fields - You can now have Checkbox style lookup fields.

Salesforce Connector

Big improvements made to the Salesforce connector.

Improved performance writing data to Salesforce. General connector usability has been improved and write performance is vastly increased with this release.
The Salesforce connector can now make hierarchical (Header/Detail) inserts and updates type relationships.
- This release vastly improves the scope of the Salesforce connector providing the ability to create/update almost any parent/child type data.
The Salesforce connector is now bundled with the product and there are sample integrations for Sage200 and Sage300 with IMan with step-by-step guides. See Sample INtegration & Cookbook Intro.

Compatibility

We've removed support for Internet Explorer. Goodbye old friend!
IMan will not function in IE.

Previous Updates

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