New features in 7.0

Reference Data Management with Data Manager

In this release we’ve added support for reference data sets to the Data Manager. Reference data sets allow you to manage static reference data that can be easily used in your CloverDX jobs (e.g. as lookups).

Reference data sets allow you to manage your data while the Data Manager will enforce various constraints placed on your data – for example it will not allow duplicate keys or misconfigured effective date intervals. This way you can make sure that your reference data stays valid and clean and will not cause data issues downstream.

All changes made to your reference data are audited and the permissions model in reference data sets will ensure that users cannot make unauthorized and unapproved changes in your shared data.

To use the reference data in your jobs, you can easily create lookups that are linked to your reference data sets. Such lookups can be used anywhere where regular lookups can be used.

Designer usability improvements

We’ve implemented significant usability improvements in CloverDX Designer in this release. The first change is in the component edit dialog – a dialog shown when you double-click any component, and which allows you to edit the component’s settings. The new dialog provides updated navigation and surfaces the properties in a way that allows you to in many cases directly modify them instead of relying on second-level modal dialogs. This in turn allows faster changes and tweaks of component properties to help make the iterative job design more effective.

The second change is in the graph editor canvas. The new design aligns component locations, sizes, and ports to the grid. This allows you to quickly create visually pleasing graphs that are easier to read and understand.

RESTConnector

The RESTConnector component now also supports OpenAPI specifications in version 2. This will allow you to consume a wider range of APIs that have not yet taken advantage of the OpenAPI v3 which was supported in CloverDX 6.7.

We’ve also made various smaller improvements to the connector – for example, it now adds all automatically populated headers so that you can change them easily, it works better with default values of headers and parameters, or allows for more natural loading/saving of request from/to files.

Platform support

With CloverDX 7.0 we simplified the deployment model to offer two tech stacks. The first stack is built on top of open-source software while the other depends on commercially supported software for organizations that require an additional level of support for their environments.

Regardless of the stack you select, CloverDX 7.0 requires Apache Tomcat 10.1 or Red Hat JBoss WebServer 6.0 with Tomcat 10.1 runtime. This change is required to allow us to support Jakarta EE specification and latest versions of various core libraries (like Spring) increasing the security of the whole platform.

The following table summarizes the supported stacks for CloverDX 7.0:

The highlighted stack is the open-source stack and is the recommended option for most of our customers.

Note that we no longer support deployments into VMware tc Server application server and that Java 11 is not supported anymore either.

Considering the application server requirements, the upgrade of CloverDX from version 6.x or older to CloverDX 7.0 cannot be done in-place but requires additional steps to install the prerequisite tech stack.

Please consult our Upgrading to CloverDX Server 7.0 article for additional details.

Note that we strive to maintain maximum compatibility of CloverDX solutions built in CloverDX platform between different versions of the platform. While CloverDX 7.0 brings many changes to the platform, most of the jobs created in recent versions of the platform with work without issues or without need for job rewrites. See more notes about functionality that was removed or changed below.

Nevertheless, every upgrade should be properly and thoroughly tested before being deployed in production.

Removed components

We have removed several deprecated components in CloverDX 7.0. All of these components have more modern replacements, most of which have been available for several years. Following is the partial list of components that have been removed and their replacements:

• RunGraph which can be replaced with ExecuteGraph and ExecuteJobflow.
• SystemExecute which can be replaced with ExecuteScript.
• SpeedLimiter which can be replaced with Sleep.
• JavaExecute which can be replaced with CustomJavaComponent.

Additional removed components were seldom used and have been deprecated for many years. To see more details about all removed components, please read more in CLO-24312 and in CLO-30576.