What's New in Rulex 4.6

Sensitivity Labels

NEW

A new tag, sensitivity, has been added to the RulexConfigurations.xml in the installation folder .supportFiles.

The tag can contain a generic string, which identifies a file as sensitive.

If the string is found within the file, during export the string is added to the exported file as a prefix, with the format: <sensitivity_word>_(filename).

Vault Support

NEW

In Rulex 4.6 a new type of process variable has been added: vault variables. Vault variables map at runtime secret values stored in a vault keeper. At the moment, support for Azure Keyvault and Centrify has been introduced, permitting users to import and use secret values stored in these two platforms.

Vault connections are created at working database level and used in all the workflows imported into the same database. Using the Vault variable panel, it is possible in each workflow to link a new process variable to a particular secret stored in the selected vault, so it can be used as a parametric option.

Vault variables override any sensitive or not-sensitive variables with the same name, and any runtime variables with the same name.

New Batch mode command

NEW

In the Rulex Command Line Interface two more commands have been added:

Rulex.exe --version: the current version of Rulex Software is retrieved without opening the GUI.

Rulex.exe -p <process name> --info: a list of properties of the selected process is returned on the shell. This process information contains the name of the user who is the owner of the process, date of creation of the process, last seen date of the process and the last execution date.

These two commands are particularly useful when creating automatic retention scripts for installation or process management.

Azure Storage BLOB service support

NEW

An Azure Storage BLOB service has been added as a possible remote origin in all text/Excel/JSON/XML import/export tasks.

Authentication to the service can be performed both by using account and shared access keys.

The complete set of CRUD operations is performed using the Azure BLOB storage REST API system.

New tab in the Workflow Review Tool

CHANGE

A new tab has been added to the Workflow Review Tool where it is possible to define rules on SQL Queries in the Conditional Import and Import from Database tasks.

The validity check template file has also been updated correspondingly and added to documentation.

New options available in import tasks

CHANGE

New options have been added to import tasks in order to:

• recreate nested structure of files when exporting XML and JSON files

• identify the attribute with the data type for XML files (previously only in JSON import tasks)

• remove extra spaces from within strings (all import tasks)

New options available in export tasks

CHANGE

New options have been added to XML and Json file export tasks in order to recreate files in flat or nested format, or according to the group column.

Update of the encryption system

CHANGE

The whole encryption system in Rulex has been uniformed and updated.

Until now sensitive process variables were encrypted using the AES CBC 256 algorithm with static key (TLS 1.1 certificate), while data/blob were encrypted using a proprietary algorithm based on the same cryptography library. 

The whole system has now been updated to use the most modern of cryptography algorithm currently present on the market. Sensitive and normal data are now encrypted using the AES GCM 256 algorithm with random public and private key (TLS 1.3 certificate). To maintain high performance levels during the  loading/storing phase, a new parallel system has also been implemented which performs encryption/storing and decryption/loading in parallel with reading/writing operations. This increases the level of internal security in Rulex without any degradation to performance levels and computation times.

Text Extract function with text attributes

CHANGE

The textExtract function in the Data Manager task now accepts integer and nominal values as start/stop entries.

When applied, extraction is performed row by row, searching for the corresponding start and stop characters for integers, or substrings for nominals.