Kourier Integrator Release 4.4
New Features and Enhancements Summary

Release Summary

The latest release of Kourier Integrator focuses primarily on enhancing Kourier Integrator so that it continues to be the most complete and easiest to use solution for creating RESTful Web Services for MultiValue databases. New in this release are two advanced features for REST: API Subscriptions (aka Webhooks) and Swagger API documentation. With these enhancements, Kourier Integrator provides a comprehensive solution for creating, testing, documenting, deploying and consuming REST APIs.

 

Release 4.4 also provides significant improvements to support implementations using multiple data accounts. System setup and administration has been simplified and performance for data exports with incremental updates has been increased.

 

See below for more detailed release notes.
 

What's New in Release 4.4

 

REST API Subscriptions

This advanced integration feature gives API consumers (the service or application calling the API) the ability to subscribe to your published APIs. Once subscribed, API consumers automatically receive notifications in real-time when data changes in the source application (e.g., new Customer, Price update, etc.). The subscribing application or service can then take the appropriate action based upon the notification. REST Subscriptions are implemented via the Webhooks paradigm and replace less efficient periodic polling methods previously used.
 
  • Expands the developer's toolkit for application integration:
    • Provides an alternative method to integrate with other applications in real-time
    • More efficient than repeatedly polling an application or database for changes
    • Supplements the ability to read/write data in real-time via REST Resources
  • Leverages Kourier’s Net Change capability (change data capture):
    • Efficiently sends only incremental data updates
    • Detects inserts, updates and deletes to data
  • Uses Kourier’s Message Queuing system to ensure message delivery
  • Subscription requests are automated and easy to use
  • Very easy to setup and requires minimal administration
  • No code changes to the source application needed to enable API Subscriptions & Net Change
  • Default Subscription properties are configurable:
    • Callback Timeout
    • Max Batch count
    • Max message days
    • Schedule start/end times
    • Schedule frequency

Swagger API Documentation

With only a single mouse click on the Get Specification button in a Kourier REST Resource definition, you can automatically generate your API documentation in ready-to-use, beautiful, interactive Swagger 2.0 format. Swagger is not only cool, it makes both API developers and API consumers more productive too. It's also the emerging standard for REST documentation because it is the world’s largest framework of API developer tools for the OpenAPI Specification.


Example Swagger documentation for a Customer resource

Why Swagger is Cool!

  • Better documentation improves developer productivity
  • Swagger documentation is interactive, making it easier to read and explore APIs
  • Helps developers visualize the interface more easily
  • API developers can preview APIs in Swagger format while building the API
  • Provides better documentation for API Consumers
  • API Consumers are more productive when implementing the APIs
  • API documentation is automatically generated using information on the Kourier REST API definition
  • Swagger documents can be generated, saved and customized for website publication
  • Developers can quickly build APIs by turning Swagger definition into code
    • Generate server stubs & client libraries in over 40 different programming languages
    • Enables faster deployment and better API adoption

Create APIs in over 40 languages using Swagger!
 

Multi-Account Improvements

There are several improvements to Kourier Integrator's ability to extract and aggregate data from multiple data accounts on a system, and then either update an enterprise MS SQL data warehouse or extract the data to another file. Several applications such as IDS Astra, Epicor Prelude and other solutions can be setup to store their data in multiple accounts and Kourier now makes it much easier manage data for these configurations.
 
  • Simplifies the overall setup and administration for multiple account implementations
  • Manage exports from all accounts using a single "Home" account
  • Easily determine which files to process using Kourier's Related Files feature
  • Increased performance of processing incremental updates (Net Change) from multiple accounts

Other Updates and Improvements

There are many other improvements, minor enhancements and stability updates to Kourier Integrator. See the highlights below.
 
  • Numerous user experience changes to improve workflow and make Kourier faster and easier to use:
    • There are now unique pages for managing REST Imports, File Imports and XML Imports to tailor the information required for each purpose
    • Added an "Advanced Setting" dialog to REST Export and Import to declare which query parameters and response formats are supported
    • Running a Service manually now prompts only for options appropriate for the service type (i.e., exports vs. imports)
    • REST Export and Import listings are filtered to show only REST related Exports and Imports
    • Updated the look and feel of the Kourier Configuration page to be more user friendly
    • Added integration filter to the Define Integrations page
  • New "Wrap Up" event handler added to all Import Specification pages (REST, XML to U2 and File to U2):
    • Use this event for logic that takes place after the current record is inserted, updated or deleted 
    • Often used to generate response data when updating records or executing actions on the U2 server
  • REST Exports automatically add a content-type header to the response headers based on the output specified
  • REST Imports include a "Response Export" field that developers can use to either render the export or load fields from code.
  • Individual files can be selected for processing in a Service for U2 to SQL Exports with Related Files:
    • When running a service manually from the Kourier UI, the user can select a specific file to process
    • This is helpful when a specific file needs to recovered, regenerated or for testing purposes
  • New conversion codes to make the developer's life a little easier:
    • @NOENCODE inhibits the standard encoding of the special characters when generating XML or JSON 
    • UBOOLEAN converts a value of "Y" or "N" to the string "true" or "false"

Learn More

If you are an existing Client using Kourier Integrator Release 4.x, you can view the detailed release notes from the online help. If you are using Release 3.x or lower, contact Kore to get more information and discuss an upgrade.

 

Please contact Kore Technologies if you would like to learn more about Kourier Integrator and how you can integrate your MultiValue system to other third-party products in real-time via RESTful Web Services. Kourier Integrator also automates the process of creating a near real-time Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse from your U2 database and/or other data sources.

MultiValue integration and data warehouse solutions that breathe new life into your enterprise applications. Contact Kore Technologies and let us know how we can serve you!

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