As my colleague, James Griffith, pointed out on his blog Improve Your Data Feed Performance with RSA Archer Release 6.4, the latest release of the RSA Archer Platform contains some pretty slick stuff which we are excited to highlight over the coming weeks/months as a part of our upcoming blog series and Free Friday Tech Huddle sessions. As a complement to James' post, I want to provide a closer look at one of the several enhancements to Data Feed Manager that is included in RSA Archer Platform 6.4.
XSLT 3.0 Support brings Archer up to speed on the latest XSL Transform capabilities. The XSLT 3.0 specification contains more new features and functionalities than I could possibly list or explain here, but I will highlight a few that I think are beneficial to all you Archerists out there. For a full list of what's new since XSLT 1.0, please check the W3.org guides: What's New in XSLT 2.0 and What's New in XSLT 3.0.
Of all the amazing features that come with XSLT 3.0, here's my top 8 for Archer folks:
In addition, with the JSON-to-XML conversion feature the RSA Archer platform is now capable of ingesting JSON as a source file structure, and includes a new Iterator Type on the Transform tab of "JSON File Iterator". For this, you must first convert your JSON file structure to XML using the above linked function, and then can process any additional transforms that are necessary before Archer ingests the resultant transformed data.
These additional features are also accompanied by another benefit of XSLT 3.0: SPEED. The XSLT 3.0 Parser, in our testing, performs the transform step of a data feed around TEN TIMES FASTER than it's 1.0 counterpart. If you're in a situation where a large data set or particularly complicated transform is adding minutes or worse to your total run time while processing the transform, switching over to the 3.0 specification could be just what the proverbial doctor ordered.
Taking advantage of the XSLT 3.0 performance improvement and unlocking the 2.0 and 3.0 feature set is as simple as updating the stylesheet version on your transform as shown below.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="3.0">
Version 1.0 stylesheets process under the 3.0 parser with no further changes, while still exhibiting similar performance gains. Taking advantage of the XSLT 3.0 (and 2.0!) features, will take a little bit more elbow grease, research, and potentially trial and error, but I'm confident that the updated specifications contain new and/or better ways of doing things that will help you be more efficient in your Data Feed Manager environment.
I hope you'll join us on the upcoming Free Friday Tech Huddle sessions to see this, and other, features in action, as well as stay tuned to the blog for more updates on these exciting features of RSA Archer Platform 6.4!
Happy Archering, everyone!
UPDATE: The slides from the Free Friday Tech Huddle where this was discussed have posted: FFTH - May 4, 2018 - Integration Improvements
