pasTransfer 4.31.0.0 RTM is now generally available.

This release of pasTransfer adds new macro commands, new connections, connection improvements, and improved exception handling and auditing capabilities to all wizards and several database connection improvements.

Macro Commands

pasTransfer has a new Increment macro which can be used to generate auto-incrementing numbers during any phase of processing.  These can be extremely useful when a destination connection requires sequential numbers for journal entries, for renumbering lines after summarization, or even for creating accumulators for debits or credits to be used in generating headers and footers.

pasTransfer has enhanced the DateFormat macro to provide support numeric date formats often encountered in JDE and DB2 based systems.  The macro can convert number => date or date => number.

New Connections

pasTransfer now supports a wide range of integrations with EDI systems dependent on the ANSI standard ASC X12 family of standards used for building supply chain integrations.

Universal Connections

pasTransfer Universal Destination connections (such as Excel, OLEDB, and ODBC) have all received significant improvements in this release.  ODBC and OLEDB connection now have greated support for transactions.  This ensures that when work is performed it either succeeds entirely or fails completely.  This prevents partial writes to destinations leaving databases in a dirty state.  Additionally, the Excel connection has been reworked so that it opens and closes files fewer times avoiding known issues with the Microsoft ACE provider that is used for accessing Excel files.  These destinations also contain toggles to suppress the export of zero-amount lines.

Exception Handling

When an application encounters an error (or what we programmers call an exception) the application needs to handle that error and depending on the severity and available information that response can vary greatly.  The majority of exceptions in pasTransfer occur either when extracting data from a source system, during the mapping phase, or when writing transformed data to a destination.  In the case of the former the majority of the exceptions revolve around invalid source data.  In the case of the latter the majority of the exceptions revolve around failed business rules.  In the case of mapping it is often missing mappings or parsing logic in macro commands. 

Regardless of where/when the exception occurs internally the exception is passed up through several layers in the application with each layer potentially creating new exceptions that encapsulate the original.  pasTransfer has been enhanced such that when exception messages are reported to either the users or the pasUnity job logs that those exception messages are now much more accurate and detailed than they were previously.  Additionally, when generating our composite error messages we no longer allow child messages that were already incorporated into a parent message to be emitted multiple times making the message more concise.

Often times (especially during the mapping phase) parallel processing may encounter several exception messages at once.  Previously this would yield a message indicating that multiple exceptions occurred with a small amount of detail.  Now those messages are much more verbose and aggregated to indicate the number of occurrences of an exception and more detailed information about when they occurred.  In many cases the most severe exception message will bubble to the top and be predominately displayed on both the job logs and work queue views in pasUnity.

Query Designer Enhancements

The query designer (opened by pressing F4) has been enhanced with Macro support and an improved mechanism for discovering database objects and auto-generating commonly used code snippets.