We are proud to announce the release of Xoom 3.9. This is a significant new release that, among other things, significantly improves overall performance and improves maintainability and readability of Xoom knowledge bases by introducing hierarchical structure of interpretation instructions.

• SyncReport script has been renamed to XoomResetHelper. The new name is more descriptive of its most common function, which is to bring configuration of a system to the saved configuration baseline. This process includes the deletion of the items that do not exist in the baseline configuration, which is not regularly part of a Xoom deployment since Xoom doesn’t delete configuration items.
• Knowledge base instructions can now be grouped together based on their ancestor nodes in XoomXML, and nested as deeply as appropriate. The XPath select statements of nested instructions will only be evaluated where containing instruction’s nodes exist. This results in easier to read and more reusable knowledge base. The performance has also been significantly improved by this change due to a dramatic decrease in the number of complex XPath evaluations.
• Knowledge base vocabulary has been updated and simplified. For example, attribute xpath has been replaced with select, and the combination of type and dynamic=”true” is now more concisely expressed simply via dyn-type. In comparer settings, select became select-key in order to avoid the clash with the new select attribute that replaces xpath. The overall desire was to change the naming to express the role of each attribute as opposed to its type.
• The performance of dependency graph calculations, in particular in complex configurations with many items and dependencies, has been significantly improved.
• Service Optimization Report Instances are no longer included in the configuration representation by default, as they are large amount of data of purely transactional nature. New parameter Product.W6.Objects.RemoveReportInstances can be used to control this behaviour.
• Added a new transformation DecorateWithAliases which adds Xoom identity attributes (in different namespaces with descriptive URNs) to the items that wouldn’t have them in regular XoomXML, such as contained items or items with multiple identities. The transformation is mostly useful for developers working on knowledge base enhancements or new transformations and report.