We are pleased to announce the release of Xoom version 3.1.1. This is a “hotfix” release containing mainly improvements in support for new Service Optimization features (in particular new scheme features since version 8.1.7) and bug fixes, as well as some improvements. We summarise the changes below.

New features

• Implemented support for virtual collections introduced in Service Optimization 8.1.7 in order to support the representation used by built-in configuration management tools. Xoom works around the Service Optimization product limitation that causes some misconfigurations to crash the configuration retrieval, allowing maximum amount of information to be extracted from Service Optimization. Due to their redundancy with the Xoom representation and some initial instability, virtual collections are disabled by default, although they can be enabled by a simple change in XoomConfig.xml.
• Implemented a new AutoCapture command that automates the creation of Xoom corpora (an equivalent manual method is described here). The command has to be run on the server that is being captured, and takes a single parameter which is a directory that will contain the corpus.
• Xoom Explorer now automatically detects all namespace prefixes defined in the loaded XML document, and supports those prefixes in XPath queries.

Improvements / changes

• Index IdNames are no longer prepended by collection names, which makes them more concise and more widely usable for referencing purposes.
• A number of additional interpretations of product and solution pack settings have been added.
• File tweaky is now configured by default, simplifying the configuration of the file versioning setup, although the query still needs to be configured manually.
• References can now be configured using optional alternative IDs.
• xpath attributes in XoomConfig.xml (and hence XoomCustom.xml) now support both relative and absolute XPaths. Therefore, relative XPaths no longer start with a “/” as that now indicates an absolute XPath.
• The Xoom installer now allows the user to choose the installation folder.
• Most reports have been reviewed and their representation improved.
• Improved the handling of white space, including line endings on different operating systems, and the nodes containing comments. Many more cases of original comments and formatting are now preserved even when the relevant nodes contain interpretations and references.
• The CSV tweaky no longer trims values by default.

Bug fixes

• Works around a Service Optimization 8.1.x bug that causes the first service call after a server restart to fail. This caused Xoom to report invalid server status after implementing scheme changes, even though said changes were implemented successfully.
• Works around an inconsistency in the way various Service Optimization versions since 7.5 reported their version. The format is now a consistent four number format taken from file versions as opposed to the installer that was used previously.
• Task Index Rule no longer contains duplicates of some properties in its body.
• The versioning script’s robustness has been improved, in particular when working with git.
• Fixed the incorrect ordering of dependencies in the files generated by Xoom Console.