Fixed Issues in Rulex 4.4.1

Passwords in clear on the VersionSettings.xml and RulexServiceSettings.xml files posed a potential security risk

A new field, called PwdsEncrypted in the VersionSettings.xml file and bPwdsEncrypted in the RulexServiceSettings.xml file, shows if all the passwords listed in the files are encrypted or not:

• True if passwords are entered from the GUI, and are consequently encrypted (default value)

• False if the passwords are entered manually in the files, and are not encrypted. In the RulexServiceSettings.xml file the first time Rulex is subsequently launched, the plain passwords are automatically encrypted and the field is set to True.

Foreign characters were not correctly managed, in particular, the textLower and textUpper functions in the Data Manager task were able to process only standard English characters.
Tasks and functions computing distances between strings sometimes produced incorrect results when considering non-English characters.

The management of Unicode characters (internally managed in UTF-8 format) is now guaranteed, ensuring correct conversion to lower or upper case, as well as a coherent computation of distances between strings.
No changes to the user interface or function calls is necessary.

Intense parallel access to external files (e.g. on SharePoint) through standard file pointer functions (such as fopen, fclose, fread, fwrite) lead at times to an unpredictable and undesired behavior.

Low level C functions (open, close, read, write) that use file descriptors have now been adopted, after having ensured that they support intense parallel access to external files without undesired effects. 

There were no character encoding options when exporting text files, and only UTF-8 was available. This was not always the best option as three unprintable characters (BOM) are added at the beginning of the file, which could, for example, prevent the execution of the file when it included a procedure.

A new option, called Character coding for output file (parametric option: filecoding), has been added to the Export to Text File task, allowing the user to choose among two different character encoding modes:

• UTF-8 (default), which writes the text file in Utf-8 coding (previous choice in Rulex 4)

• ASCII, which exports a file with plain text (without BOM).

An unhandled exception was thrown by the Export to Text File task if a user tried to append an empty dataset (0 lines) to an existing not empty file.

This issue has been solved and exceptions are now prevented.

An unhandled exception was thrown if a user tried to open an XLS file (i.e. a file created with a version of Microsoft Excel prior to 2003) which had been renamed with the wrong xlsx extension.

XLS/XLSX files are now correctly recognized without referring to the extension, and import operations now complete successfully.

A software issue was present in the Linear Programming task related to maximization problems.
Moreover if the cost value function was given as missing, optimization lead to unexpected results.

Both issues have now been solved and the expected behavior for the Linear Programming task is maintained in these situations.

The Import from Json task failed with an unhandled exception when there were too long (more than 142) character strings.

This issue has now been solved and the limit has been removed.

Conflicts between two concurrent push operations in workflow versioning workflows lead to an incorrectly created final workflow in some circumstances.
The issue was related to the use of the default merge policy.

The default merge policy default has been corrected, and the software issues has consequently been fixed.
Now the final result is the requested merged workflow.

When using loop executions on modules the decremental behavior of the iterator, and the possibility to increase/decrease with a step different from -1/1, lead to an unhandled exception.

Both these issues have now been solved and loops are correctly executed.

Median computations were not providing standard values on some sets of data.

The algorithm has been aligned to compute quantiles and medians according to the most used definitions in literature.

Rulex's output server mail was flagged as spam/junk mail on several occasions.
This was due to multiple accesses being performed in different parts of the world by the same user.

A redirection of the mail system to a unique server situated in Western Europe has been implemented.

The Concatenation task returned an unhandled exception when a binary and a nominal column were concatenated. 

The Concatenation task now correctly performs the right operation without throwing exceptions.

Server Mail was not configurable by the client IT owner

Server mail can now be customized under request of the client IT team.

API Rulex Connections were HTTP and not HTTPS (only for On Demand and Server modes).

API Rulex Connections are now SSL/TLS compliant (only for On Demand and Server modes).