CONNECT 5.2 Release Notes

Version History

Summary

Release 5.2 continues to build on the functionality and architecture introduced in Release 4.0 through additional features, selected improvements, and bug fixes. We encourage the CONNECT community to upgrade to Release 5.2 to take advantage of these updates. Details can be found in the following subsections:

Enhancements and Announcements

Java 7 no longer supported

As of CONNECT 5.2, only Java 8 is supported.

Certificate Manager updates

Certificate expiration alerts have been added to the CONNECT Admin GUI dashboard. A certificate chain of trust view has been added to provide a clear hierarchical representation of certificates in the trust store.

Exchange Manager updates

Organizational view and search function have been enhanced to provide a more user friendly experience.

Internal Endpoints Manager

An internal endpoint editor has been added to more easily manage internal adapter, policy engine and other endpoints necessary for transaction processing.

Document Data Submission

A web service to support a proposed Register Document workflow has been created, as well as a reference adapter for testing and demonstrating the new service.

Patient Location Query

A web service to support a proposed Record Locator Service workflow has been created, as well as a reference adapter for testing and demonstrating the new service.

Failure Logging

This addition to CONNECT's existing Event Logging feature allows users to quickly locate exceptions and transaction failures.

Additional Admin GUI updates

Admin GUI web services have been decoupled from the CONNECT core to provide a more lightweight gateway to CONNECT users not utilizing the interface. An alerts and notifications section has been added to the dashboard to make users aware of important system notifications. The Cross Query Gateway Client now includes SAML assertions with real time user data and can be used for fully-compliant Exchange messaging.

Test Data Loader updates

Test document creation has been refined to better reflect existing Document Query and Document Submission requirements.

Security Scans findings and security update

The CONNECT team as part of the release readiness process in 5.2, identified and addressed findings based on security scans performed on the CONNECT gateway code base. Several tools were used including Fortify, SonarQube, OWASP Dependency Checks and FindBugs as part of the scans executed on the 5.2 code.  All Critical, High, Medium, and Cat 1 Low findings were addressed and the team will continue to work with the federal partners to ensure the code quality meets their implementation requirements. Addressing these security findings will ensure adopters deploy a more secure implementation and will assist in meeting their organization's internal security reviews, as they deploy CONNECT in their preferred environments. 

Release testing

CONNECT 5.2 was install-tested in multiple environments and with multiple operating systems to support the federal partner environments and application servers/configurations used by the community.  As with each release, CONNECT was regression tested as well as integration tested against prior supported versions of CONNECT. Test summary report is /wiki/spaces/CONNECTWIKI/pages/661323837. See below the testing matrix with the application servers/OS that were utilized for release testing.

Testing summary by Operating system and application server for 5.2

Legend:

• S – Source Code Installation and Validation
• B – Binary Installation and Validation
• R – Regression
• IO – Interoperability
• A – Admin GUI (IE v11, Chrome)

Product Development Notes

Open source application server – WildFly

From a product development perspective, the team uses WildFly as the team-supported open source application server. We are aware of community members using CONNECT on JBoss EAP, the enterprise version of WildFly. We have published instructions for FIPS configurations on /wiki/spaces/CONNECTWIKI/pages/108691466, WebSphere and /wiki/spaces/CONNECTWIKI/pages/75038722.

Development, installation and new feature testing will be done on WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss EAP 7 and WildFly only.

JIRA Trackers for Work Accomplished for Release 5.2

The following tables display issues resolved or tasks addressed during the release of CONNECT 5.2. The details of these issues can be found in the CONNECT Issue Tracker, linked to in the tables below.

Features and improvements

(User stories, Improvements)  

 Known Issues

Issue
CONN-1218 - CONNECTDirectConfig - postmasterAddressId Not Populating OPEN
CONN-1138 - Direct Interop: Multi-Recipient Messages(Inbound) issue when recipient is one of many recipients in the message OPEN
Garbage Collection (GC) exceptions may occur if CONNECT is undeployed and re-deployed without a server restart in between

Requirements Traceability

Details of the functional requirements can be found in the following JIRA user stories. The 'Traceability' column provides useful wiki links, associated ticket information and test case traceability for these requirements.