Semarchy xDM 2.2 release notes

Feature highlights

Semarchy xDM 2.2 brings master data governance to the next level by introducing a redesigned user experience with enhanced interactivity.

Redesigned master data governance experience

Semarchy xDM introduces a redesigned interface for business users and data stewards exercising master data governance.

This user interface is separated from the design-time workbench and provides simplified and powerful access to the master data. It has been enhanced in the following areas:

Clarity

  • An updated Home page with shortcuts to workflows

  • A simplified layout showing only relevant content and options

  • Simplified forms and editors

  • An issue detection report showing all data issues data validations, duplicates, concurrent changes ) in a single place, with the capability to export the issue report.

Efficiency

  • A reorganized navigation panel

  • Quick Search to find any piece of data at any time

  • Consistently reorganized actions

  • Direct workflow actions to claim, un-claim, or complete a task in a single step

  • Direct duplicate management actions (merge, split, etc.) from the data lists and tree view

  • Direct data editing actions from the data lists and tree view

Comfort

  • URLs to directly access applications and data editions

  • Support for multiple browser tabs

  • An elegant theme with an improved icon set

With no additional design-time effort, this new simple, fast and elegant interface is available from your Semarchy xDM instance on the /data path.

Interactive and safe data authoring

Semarchy xDM 2.2 adds new benefits for users authoring data in the hub: data entry is made simpler, faster and safer.

Interactive data augmentation and validation

With this feature, developers can define enrichers and validations triggered on workflow tasks and transitions. Resulting workflows deliver more interactivity to the business users and data stewards authoring master data in the hub:

  • Enrichers are triggered from data entry forms, automatically augmenting input fields or filling in computed fields. At the same time, validations pro-actively notify users of possible data issues. All this happens interactively while the user enters keystrokes or moves from field to field.

  • When the user completes a workflow task, enrichers and validations are automatically triggered to enforce data quality policies. Issues detected are reported as simple warning messages or may be configured to block the user from completing the task.

Developers can configure enrichers and validations from the Properties view for tasks and transitions in the Workflow diagram for data entry workflows.

Pro-active duplicates and unique key detection

ID Matching entities, frequently used for data authoring patterns, now support duplicate and unique key violation detection within workflows:

  • Developers can define matchers on ID Matching entities. Such matchers detect duplicates for a record while it is created.

  • Unique Keys defined in the model on ID Matching entities are also checked in data entry workflows.

When a business user edits a record in a workflow, the interface warns him immediately if he is about to create:

  • A record similar to one that already exists (according to the matcher), allowing him to check this record out and modify it instead of creating a duplicate.

  • A record that violates a unique key definition.

Developers enable duplicate detection on ID Matching Entities by creating Matchers for these entities. Unique key validation is configured as a validation in a workflow task or transition.

Concurrent change detection

Data being processed in an workflow may become out of sync if the original record is modified by another workflow or by a publishing process.

Such concurrent change is now automatically detected in the workflows. A warning is raised to the user working on the out-of-sync data, allowing him to ignore or merge these changes into his data transaction.

Concurrent changes are automatically detected and raised as needed when processing data entry workflows.

Design-time enhancements

Designers benefit from the productivity features of Semarchy xDM 2.2 to deliver faster iterations for their MDM initiatives.

Workflow design productivity

The workflow design has been enhanced with capabilities to support not only Interactive Data Augmentation and Validation, but also with the ability to add Customized Labels on transitions.

The design-time workflow editor now includes a Properties view. Using this view, developers can modify tasks and transitions without leaving the diagram, enhancing their productivity in workflow design.

Filters on child records

SemQL has been enhanced to support conditions based on child records.

For example, if a Customer has several Contacts, you can now easily design filters involving the customers' contacts:

  • Customers with at least one contact.: ANY contacts HAVE (1=1)

  • Customers with all contacts without email. ALL contacts HAVE (email IS NULL)

  • Customers with contacts located in a different country than the customer: ANY contacts HAVE (country != customer.country)

The new ANY/ALL syntax is available from the Expression Editor.

Export/import models everywhere

Model edition export is now allowed from deployment repositories. With this option, administrators can transfer models as they were originally deployed between test/UAT and production environments.

Model edition import is now possible to development repositories. Import closed or open model editions either as new models, or on top of open model editions.
Using this feature, developers can transfer models across repositories at design-time with a just few clicks.

New plugin: Text normalization and transliteration

This new plugin applies normalization, transliteration (including Cyrillic, Arabic, Japanese and other eastern languages) and phonetic (Metaphone, soundex, double metaphone, caverphone, refined soundex) transformations to text strings.

With this plugin, the certification process can transform international strings to a common standard, which makes fuzzy matching possible even for data published in different languages and character sets.

Other notable changes

Design-time

  • Field-Level Consolidators using the Preferred Publishers strategy now have a Skip Null option.

  • New golden record attributes: Masters Count stores the number of master records contributing to a golden and Is Confirmed indicates whether a user has validated the match group.

Administration

  • Web Services management is now attached to the Execution Engine platform privilege

  • Notification Servers and Variable Value Providers management are now attached to the Data Location platform privilege.

Deployment

  • Administrators can now close data editions with open workflows, and have these workflows continue in the new data edition.

  • New closeAndCreateNewDataEdition web service to support Data Edition management automation.

  • External Loads are no longer attached to a data edition:

    • In the Data Locations editor, the Latest Loads are now under the data branch node, and no longer under each data edition.

    • Loads start automatically on the latest edition of the data branch and the Data Edition ID is no longer needed to start a load.

    • The new version 1.1 of the Integration Web Services is updated and the dataEditionID element is no longer needed for the getNewLoadID operation.

    • In the repository schema, the MTA_GET_NEW_LOADID, MTA_CANCEL_LOAD and MTA_SUBMIT_LOAD PL/SQL functions and procedures are deprecated (but still work) and replaced by the GET_NEW_LOADID (this new function does not have a Data Edition ID parameter), SUBMIT_LOAD functions and the CANCEL_LOAD procedure in the INTEGRATION_LOAD package.

  • In the Activity web service, the CompleteTask request now requires a transition name (TransitionName) instead of a task name (TransitionTaskName is deprecated). Existing workflows will work with the new web services as the upgrade names the transitions as their target tasks.

Changelog

Version 2.2.4

Known issues

  • MDM-1463 - Geronimo 3.0.1 and WebSphere Liberty Profile 8.5 are not supported due to class loading incompatibility.

  • MDM-1393 - Data export (XLSX) opens in Excel 2010 with hidden columns. This problem is due to a JVM versions 1.7.0_21. To solve it, upgrade to a later JVM Version.

  • MDM-1386 - Fuzzy Matching Entities with a single attribute are not correctly handled by the certification process. These entities can be used for inheritance purposes.

Bug fixes

  • MDM-1992 - Data Applications appears as a blank page since Firefox 29 upgrade.

Version 2.2.3

Known issues

  • MDM-1463 - Geronimo 3.0.1 and WebSphere Liberty Profile 8.5 are not supported due to class loading incompatibility.

  • MDM-1393 - Data export (XLSX) opens in Excel 2010 with hidden columns. This problem is due to a JVM versions 1.7.0_21. To solve it, upgrade to a later JVM Version.

  • MDM-1386 - Fuzzy Matching Entities with a single attribute are not correctly handled by the certification process. These entities can be used for inheritance purposes.

New features

  • MDM-1597 - Field Level Consolidation performance improved when using the Preferred Publisher (with Skip Null options), Largest or Smallest Value consolidation strategies.

  • MDM-1577 - Google Maps Plugin Enricher uses the system proxy configuration specified with -Dhttp.proxy and -Dhttp.port.

  • MDM-1553 - Matching performance improvement for the Assigned SDPK to integration table for detected duplicates task.

Bug fixes

  • MDM-1617 - NullPointerException when using the Google Maps Enricher with empty parameters.

  • MDM-1595 - Upgrading no longer automatically activates the Skip Nulls option in Field Level Consolidators using the Preferred Publisher strategy.

  • MDM-1582 - Business object views selection wizard on data entry task wizard looses the existing business object views order.

  • MDM-1545 - Model validation fails after an upgrade if workflows have been removed between model editions.

  • MDM-1530 - Model validation fails after an upgrade to version 2.2 when an entity is referenced several times from the same workflow.

  • MDM-1491 - IllegalArgumentException: Argument cannot be null error appears when accessing the Dashboard. This error occurs when an integration batch has no attached job log.

Version 2.2.2

Known issues

  • MDM-1463 - Geronimo 3.0.1 and WebSphere Liberty Profile 8.5 are not supported due to class loading incompatibility.

  • MDM-1393 - Data export (XLSX) opens in Excel 2010 with hidden columns. This problem is due to a JVM versions 1.7.0_21. To solve it, upgrade to a later JVM Version.

  • MDM-1386 - Fuzzy Matching Entities with a single attribute are not correctly handled by the certification process. These entities can be used for inheritance purposes.

Bug fixes

  • MDM-1509 - The Welcome page raises a HTTP-500 error when a model is not valid.

  • MDM-1508 - Upgrading to version 2.2 generates invalid validation configuration errors on data entry workflows.

Version 2.2.1

New features

  • MDM-58 - Excel and CSV export limits can be configured from the Administration Console.

  • MDM-664 - Email Enricher now provides an Offline mode.

  • MDM-846 - Purge Scheduler wizard and editor: Schedule definition interface review.

  • MDM-1012 - Google Maps Plug-in now supports Client ID and Key.

  • MDM-1161 - DataSource Value Provider now supports JDBC datasource selection in a dropdown component.

  • MDM-1301 - New Microsoft Bing Maps plug-in for address enrichment

  • MDM-1340 - Enricher’s Active property label is renamed to Run in Jobs.

  • MDM-1377 - Editable state of the Source ID field is made more obvious in data entry forms.

  • MDM-1389 - Engine Administration: Ignore Failure action is renamed to Cancel Job.

  • MDM-1392 - Semarchy xDM is now certified on Glassfish 4.0.

  • MDM-1403 - Reviewed title and button labels for the Open Data Edition dialog.

  • MDM-1437 - Semarchy xDM is now certified on non-CDB Oracle 12c instances.

  • MDM-1438 - Semarchy xDM is now certified on Tomcat 8 and WildFly 8. Dropped support for JBoss 5.x.

  • MDM-1455 - MDM Applications Logo can be customized from the Administration Console.

  • MDM-1467 - Date management is now consistently based on the application server time zone.

  • MDM-1477 - Workbench and Applications URLs changed to /semarchy/workbench and /semarchy/data.

  • MDM-1478 - Added a view action when browsing BO View records.

  • MDM-1479 - Added Start/End/Duration values to the Data Certification Queue page.

  • MDM-1480 - New Welcome Page for /semarchy.

Bug fixes

  • MDM-710 - Overview page not correctly refreshed when a data location upgrade fails.

  • MDM-1343 - Data location upgrade now fails with an appropriate message if the model edition has validation errors.

  • MDM-1359 - Data location’s datasource selection drop-down misses certain datasources if some of them are invalid.

  • MDM-1369 - Workflow task overview in the applications does not have enough space for workflow diagram.

  • MDM-1404 - Cryptic warning message during checkout is now removed One or more records in the hierarchy to check out already exist in Data Entry publisher Product Hub Data Entry. If you proceed, those Data Entry records…

  • MDM-1426 - Missing Scrollbar on Home Page’s Navigate view.

  • MDM-1428 - In the data entry forms, the Save button is now disabled if errors prevent from saving the record.

  • MDM-1429 - In data entry forms, attributes with embedded content display type are displayed twice.

  • MDM-1434 - Client API method completionResult.getNewTask() returns null value.

  • MDM-1435 - Attribute with Image Display Type is not updated when using Previous/Next record if new record contains null image.

  • MDM-1456 - Character & disappears from labels coming from Model Design.

  • MDM-1462 - Paginated Queries are too slow due to wrong pagination query.

  • MDM-1468 - Import (Exact ID Matching/ID generated) fails with could not find row with ID xxx from hub when record exists only with non-data-entry publisher ID in hub.

  • MDM-1471 - Missing Horizontal Scrollbars in Form Editor.

  • MDM-1472 - Data entry Enricher on Field Exit is not triggered when exiting a LOV field.

  • MDM-1482 - Exporting Documentation should raise an error for an invalid model.

  • MDM-1484 - REGEXP_SUBSTR Syntax misses subexpr parameter.

  • MDM-1486 - Multiple malfunctions with the Refresh button of the Validation report.

  • MDM-1487 - SemQL does not support CURRENT_TIMESTAMP() without precision.

Version 2.2.0

Known issues

  • MDM-1298 - [WebLogic 12] 403 error page is not displayed when user is not authorized

  • MDM-1201 - Incorrect Mixed Content Warning in IE8 with HTTPS Configuration (IE Bug)

New features

  • MDM-970 - Support Filters on the Many relationships

  • MDM-971 - Support for enrichers and validations in task and transition in data entry workflows

  • MDM-975 - Support for BO Views defined at task level for data entry workflows.

  • MDM-1000 - Design time Import/Export of Model Edition

  • MDM-1041 - BO View display order can be defined for data entry workflows.

  • MDM-1083 - Automated ID generation in Data Entry for Fuzzy Matching Entities

  • MDM-1110 - Support export from Deployment repository

  • MDM-1140 - Add Masters Count on Golden Records

  • MDM-1141 - Add a new attribute on Golden records to tell whether Golden Is Confirmed or not

  • MDM-1144 - Closing and creation new data editions should keep running workflows and loads

  • MDM-1146 - New Web Service to Close and Create a New Data Edition

  • MDM-1213 - New xframeoptions context parameter (web.xml/semarchy.xml) to configure iframe embeddability (X-Frame-Options)

  • MDM-290 - Web Service Administration is now attached to the Execution Engine Privilege, and the Notification Servers to the Data Location Privileges.

  • MDM-847 - Improved user feedback when using reserved names for attributes

  • MDM-870 - Support for Browser Multi-Tab

  • MDM-1126 - First Form/Table View created for an entity is called DefaultFormView/DefaultTableView by default

Bug fixes

  • MDM-622 - Search/filter is not persisted when using the Back button on BO Views

  • MDM-743 - New option for default Data Import settings

  • MDM-746 - Data Import: Date and DateTime format preferences do not have default values

  • MDM-756 - New Warning in model validation if an integration job has a possible wrong order in tasks

  • MDM-796 - Sequences might not be ordered sequentially when using RAC

  • MDM-840 - [Address Enricher] OnDemand mode doesn’t work anymore

  • MDM-850 - In data import, if no PK is defined in the form view, the mapping is impossible

  • MDM-860 - Incorrect attributes order in attribute picker: foreign attribute is always listed at the end

  • MDM-863 - Setting an empty field separator in data import wizard hangs preview and allows the Next button

  • MDM-864 - Display types not used in record checkout tables view

  • MDM-866 - Refresh Button does not work on a BO View after it was modified in data entry

  • MDM-867 - Session ending do not redirected to the login screen on Internet Explorer

  • MDM-868 - Data Import Fails if the option The imported file contains an ID column is selected and the form view does not contain SourceID or the preferences reference obsolete attributes

  • MDM-873 - Incorrect ordering of the BO Views in the hierarchy of the data entry editor

  • MDM-874 - Data Entry raises a Not Yet Implemented exception when there is a unique key check marked as pre-consolidation

  • MDM-875 - LOVs contained in Complex Types do not appear according to the LOV Display Format Preference

  • MDM-1162 - Data export fails when a Form Attribute is an expression

  • MDM-1191 - HTTP Status 408 Error when accessing the login page

  • MDM-1192 - Checking out a record already checked out does not refresh the record from the hub

  • MDM-1196 - Duplicate Management Checkout filter expression editor warns when an unknown function is used

  • MDM-1198 - Link to a Grand-Parent FDN causes an Unhandled event loop exception

  • MDM-1275 - [WebLogic 12c] Data UI cannot be opened and Data Edition Web services cannot be started (Issue with JAXB)

  • MDM-1276 - [WebLogic 12c] Error 404 when accessing http://host:port/semarchy instead of http://host:port/semarchy/

  • MDM-1295 - Unable to the Email of a Role in the Administration Console

  • MDM-1317 - Incorrect definition for the entity Remove privilege indicated in the documentation

  • MDM-1326 - NullPointerException and Action buttons disappear when clicking record with specific record level privileges defined

  • MDM-1329 - SQL Query Generation generates aliases containing reserved keywords

  • MDM-1330 - Data Import now handles files with a large number of columns detected due to incorrect separator definition

  • MDM-1331 - Embedded content in form views does not display correctly in Internet Explorer

  • MDM-1335 - Checking-out a cluster of objects containing a child with no privileges is enabled but causes an exception.

  • MDM-1383 - Export Menu appears even without export privilege on entity