The Boomi Blog

Clean up your data with new Cleanse functionality

When integrating data from legacy systems to SaaS applications or other enterprise software it is common that the data will have any combination of problems.  Things like the appearance of bad/unexpected characters, inconsistent date or numeric formats, missing mandatory values, etc.  When you are looking to automate business processes that rely on this data, it can be an ongoing maintenance problem.  Many companies end up dealing with ongoing manual intervention of their integration processes by fixing this data by hand and then reprocessing it.  In fact, analyst groups like the Yankee Group estimate that companies end up spending more than twice as much maintaining the integrations versus the initial purchase of the integration software.

To help solve this problem, we have added Cleanse capabilities to Boomi On Demand.  You now have the ability to set up validation rules for individual fields in individual records.  Things like "is the field empty", "is it a date", "is it in dollars", etc.  When a validation is failed, you can then explicitly handle this failure.  You can choose to reject just the failed record, halt processing of the data set altogether, or define options to automatically repair the data so it can be processed.  For example, imagine a scenario where you are retrieving a flat file containing several hundred thousand rows of data.  You can now strip out just the rows that fail your validations, and continue processing the "clean" rows successfully.  You can queue up any rejected data and handle it any number of ways; email someone, ftp that data somewhere, create log records in a database, etc.

You can try it out yourself for free here.

New Features, Faster Integration Deployment

We are happy to announce some exciting features that we've released this week.  The three major enhancements have been Test Mode, Cross Reference Tables and Flat File Import.  We are always looking at ways to reduce the time it takes to setup an integration and get it working.  You find that as a common theme in our latest feature releases.

Test Mode

The first enhancement, Test Mode, is by far the most exciting.  There is no longer the need to build a process, deploy, execute & wait for the results in the Manage tab.  You now actually have the ability to test a process right from the Build tab while the process is open!  You simply need to click 'Test Mode' located in the upper right hand corner of your process and the screen will transform for you.  Choose your atom, hit the play button and watch it run.  You'll even see each shape hilight green and red based on the status of the run.  Logging also occurs at each shape, so debugging becomes very easy.  There are some data & size limitations for testing, but it comes in handy during development.

Cross Reference Tables

Next is our Cross Reference Table functionality.  Ever have some referencable lists that you'd like to maintain, but dont want to create a database table somewhere or write code?  For example, System A may have our country code defined as "_unitedStates", while System B defines it as "US", and System C may be "United States".  You no longer need to waste time on a database on your network, or write code to cross reference these values.  You can just create a table in your process and use/reuse in your maps, decisions, message shapes, etc.

Flat File Importer

Last but not least is our flat file importer.  We've heard the requests of our users and delivered.  You no longer have to manually build out your flat file mapping structures by hand.  In the flat file profile, you simply need to click the import button and pick a CSV file that is representative of your sample data.  Bingo, fields get populated for you!  Now all thats left is to define your length and mandatory field level rules.  We have now taken the fastest-to-deploy integration service and made it even faster!

We hope you all enjoy these recent additions and there are much more to come.  If you have any feedback on these, or other recommendations, please join our forums (www.boomi.com/bod_forums) and chime in.  Or if you're working in the application, feel free to ping our support team via live chat with your ideas as well (8am-8pm ET)  We truly welcome your thoughts!

Use Alerts to watch your integrations

One of the features we released last month was Alerts functionality.  Alerts allow you to subscribe via RSS to either an account level or Atom level feed of your integration workflows.  You can subscribe to a "Alerts Only"  feed to receive notifications of execution errors or if the Atom goes offline, or a Monitor feed which includes all of this information plus completion notifications as well.  The Monitor feed is useful if you need to provide users with access to what is happening in your account/Atom, without giving them a login.

Many applications and devices now support RSS natively, so you can also serve these alerts up right inside the app of your choice.

If you are watching multiple RSS feeds, aggregators like Google Reader are great because they allow you to tag and organize large numbers of feeds very efficiently.