InFlight 5.6 Release Notes

These release notes provide a definitive description of InFlight release 5.6 and its numerous updates, fixes, and improvements. We would be happy to discuss with individual clients the changes that are most relevant to them. If this would be of interest, please reach out to your primary InFlight representative.

There are two important updates that all InFlight customers should be aware of because they dramatically simplify configuration management and improve stability.  They are;

1. List-Based Configuration Overrides
2. InFlight Configuration Packs

List-based overrides are a way of manipulating InFlight rules and configuration settings through SharePoint lists, without the need to access the file system on SharePoint Web Front-End servers.  InFlight Configuration Packs are groups of rules that are contained in individual WSP packages.

Configuration Packs may be added to, or removed from, an InFlight installation with affecting the rest of the system.  This means, for example, that the rules to support PeopleTools 8.53 will be contained in a Configuration Pack that can be installed via a WSP without needing to change any other part of InFlight (or invoke an iisreset, for that matter).  An additional benefit is that customers may see what InFlight configurations are installed at a glance, simply by looking at SharePoint’s Central Administration > Solution Management page.

Another key feature of InFlight 5.6 is the capability for Data Captures.  This is a way to provide InFlight with an XPath map of the data to capture from a target page, and receive JSON, XML, or XSLT-transformed HTML back.  The key benefit for customers is that InFlight can extract key information from a page in the same way users would see it, but in a format much easier to consume, reformat and manipulate — all without the need to develop PeopleSoft pagelets or other content server modifications.

In addition, we are introducing the concept of managed regression testing; you tell us what components you’re running and we will test them on each new InFlight build. Optionally, for even better results, you may give us access to your DEV/UAT environments and we’ll regression test against your environment.

These release notes are intended for those managing an InFlight installation and those people who perform the installation updates into an operational system. This update is provided at no cost for all InFlight customers who are current on their Maintenance and Support agreements. Our objective is to make it as easy, cost-effective and painless as possible for InFlight customers to accept the newest updates as they are released.

InFlight 5.5 was released on August 17, 2011. Below is a history of the changes in the product since that time.

v5.6.1

• Issue with ‘not authorized’ message in 8.52, now able to set custom messages.
• Added CheckpointLogger class to handle creating a transcript for checkpoints.
• Updated Transformer to handle non-ASCII characters in form POSTs correctly
• Removev Context.RequestPathProcessed property; making better use of TargetUriProcessed instead
• Scoped the InFlight-Config feature to WebApplication instead of Site
• “Adopt SharePoint Styles” is now “Use Clear Style” in InFlight Viewer Configuration
• Added a DIV wrapper to deal with multiple XPath nodes that were being carved up to an ancestor using Remove up to XPath rules
• Removed deprecated _regexBtrgLicensedServers as a configured value, since we no longer use it
• Updated obfuscation settings
• Removed deprecated BtrgContentViewer feature, as it’s redundant
• Added functionality to load ReplacementRules from InFlight.ConfigPacks as well as BTRG.Protected. The functionality checks the folder which contains BTRG.Protected to find all files with the naming convention InFlight.ConfigPack.<name>.config and if it finds any files, it will read the configs and the import the rules.

v5.6.0

• New Session Handling mechanism; DataCapture functionality; filter by User Agent or App Name / Version; Blackboard SSO support; directives in URL as ClientParams; numerous bugfixes
• Cleaned up Request calls in InFlightSessionCache to leverage Uri.GetLeftPart(UriPartial.Authority)
• Modified creating/appending InFlightSessionId cookie to use httpOnly
• Added InFlightInMemorySessionCache and InFlightInMemorySessionStore. The store simply implements a Session construct which tracks all sessions purely in memory and the InMemorySessionCache just leverages this store.

v5.5.5

• Added using DOM ID as ClientId in ContentViewer ; when used, dramatically reduced the number of open PeopleSoft sessions
• Added SessionCache functionality and removing IRequiresSessionState from main handler to remove blocking of request. When the same person makes 2 requests at the same time both requiring the same session.
• InFlightSessionCache was added to replace Session, so that the main handler no longer implements IRequireSessionState. It acts as an intermediary Session and mediates the saving and loading of data off to a separate handler which implements IRequiresSessionState and supports read/writing the data to the asp.net session.

• InFlightSessionHandler was added to implement accessing the asp.net session. It reads and writes data to and from the asp.net session. In this way, it only blocks a request for the period its reading/writing, and relieves the main session from blocking any other request leveraging the same asp.net SessionId.
• Added List-based Rules Overrides;
• Added an IFRelay-targeting IFV
• Added List-based Config overrides

• Updated to include Language Switcher in WEBLIB_INFLIGHT

• Added nicer error messages; better config lookup mechanism; revised PeopleCode
• Improved implementation for Config Feature EventReceiver
• Improved implementation for “Processing…” message
• Added Ability to Pull Verbatim Content
• Improved technique for replacing hostnames back into content server requests
• Added SimpleBounce SSO redirect functionality

• Added additional logging hooks
• Added new customer-specific WSP package

• Improved performance in the InFlightModule, with RegEx-based rejection in active mode

• revised where the Session module is added in the WebConfigModifications listv5.5.4a

• Updated SPWebConfigModificationOwner
• Added new Passive Module class; support for multiple target system userIDs in User Properties for SSO; now removes duplicate entries in form body
• Improved Server-side MultiHop Support
• Made TrimDocumentDomain optional; added support for failover SSO identity attributes

• Added support for RequestHeadersToStrip
• Added support for about:blank targets in the IFV
• Improved InFlight cache management performance