Pentagull is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 19.04 of the ESB platform.

What's new for End-Users

If you use the multi-factor authentication features of ESB to require your users to enter a PIN as part of the authentication process, you now have the option of increasing the length of the PIN from 4 to a maximum of 8 digits. This change is available for both ESB and Self-Service user accounts.

The Work Basket and Related Items pages have been tweaked so that if you are viewing a list where all items are of the same type, you will be able to tell what type of object you are viewing.

What's new for System Configurators

A brand-new Business Rules editor has been introduced based on the latest MVC technology. As well as carrying over all the features you have come to know and love from the original editor, we have introduced the concept of a whole new kind of business rule: Basic rules can be created without the need to write any expressions – the entire process is driven by graphical elements and drop down lists. This is an exciting new area that we will be continuing to develop over the coming months. We now refer to the traditional hand-written rules as Advanced Rules. As we continue to expand the breadth of functionality available in Basic Rules, we expect that you will be able to accomplish more and more of your business logic without the need to write advanced rules – however there will always be situations where a complex rule needs to be written by hand and we have no plans to stop supporting advanced rules.

Another new feature in 19.04 is the ability for you to upload a graphical process diagram against each Object Template. This makes it easy for System Configurators to see at-a-glance how a process is structured by viewing it in diagrammatic form – great for getting new members of the team up to speed quickly.

The first thing you are likely to notice in 19.04 however is the brand new System Configuration landing page. This page is designed to give you a host of key information at your fingertips, including the health of your object templates, a summary of recent events, and links to important resources such as the Release Notes, Documentation Portal and Discussion Forum.

What's new for Developers

The internal ESB Event Log, which provides a structured mechanism for developers to record important events about activities performed by their code, now supports JSON-formatted data in the EventData property. This allows the graphical Event Log Viewer to display data in a more readable fashion and allows automated tools to better manipulate event data. You can continue to place unstructured data in the EventData property and it will be treated as such, and displayed in raw form to the user, however for any new developments or significant reworks, we recommend moving to a JSON format.

Other changes for developers include some bug fixes when generating configuration values, and a handful of new and updated method signatures. You’ll find full details in the Technical Release Notes.

Further Reading

In this article we have identified just a handful of the changes in this release, however we recommend that all existing users consult the Release Notes for a complete list of changes.