Inventu Viewer+ Base Product and Components

(Version: 6.0.102 October 14, 2023)

Inventu Viewer Emulation Service

• VT220 / ASCII printing fixes to accommodate text-only (non-PCL) jobs with form-feeds vs counting lines. This was also causing a loop/session lock when printing some reports.
• Sessions that are not responding to internal requests will be re-initialized while an automatic mini-dump will be taken to assist in determining the cause of the internal issue. This prevents a server from losing the ability to start new sessions, a rare occurrence on heavily loaded servers.

FVTerm Web Terminal Emulator

• Users can now assign arbitrary text, [tab] and [enter] keys in the Keyboard mapping tool as a simple keystroke macro. This can also be set by the Administrator and made default using standard editing of the SCKeyDefs.js file.  The keyboard mapping tool was also tweaked to better align the key dropdown selector and entry fields.
• A new messaging API module scripts/FVTermMsgApi.js has been implemented that has the same calls as the existing FVTermParent.js file but will utilize the Javascript channel messaging API to avoid the need to use the document.domain setting, which has been deprecated (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/domain ). Any customers currently hosting the FVTerm application in an iframe will need to implement browser header overrides in web.config in both the FVTerm and host application if they are not on the same server (set header Origin-Agent-Cluster: ?0).  For more information see the updated help at https://software.inventu.com/help/HTML/FVTermParent .  Note that due to the nature of the messaging API to maintain synchronization hosting functions may need to be declared using the async keyword and use the await keyword when calling certain functions.
• The scripts/FVSessions.js file has been upgraded to utilize the new FVTermMsgApi.js calls by default. This default can be controlled by setting FVSessions.config.msgAPI=false prior to starting a session.  Hosting pages utilizing the FVSessions.js and wishing to take advantage of the messaging API will need to swap including FVTermParent.js to including FVTermMsgApi.js.  See https://software.inventu.com/help/HTML/FVSessions/index.html for more information.
• When user sessions are configured to be persistent (Profile Advanced settings “Keep Sessions Active” and “Keep Alive on Browser Close” both checked) and tracked (Web Server User Interface setting “Track Users Active Sessions” and View Advanced setting “Display Users Active Sessions”), when the user has closed the browser tab for an active session, it will show-up in the sessions list with a green “Available” instead of the number of seconds idle. This makes it easier for a user to identify idle sessions when starting-up multiple sessions.
• A new configuration option for the Web Server settings in the Security section is “Session Cookie Expiration Days” to enable sessions to last longer for users that keep sessions longer than a day. The default has been 1 day for a session connection cookie expiration—with the new setting this can be changed to 2 or more days to avoid orphaned sessions when, for example, the “Keep Alive on Browser Close” option is checked.
• In a rare occurrence, when a user had a session over a day old (with one day cookie expiration at 1 day) and due to some circumstance such as the PC being asleep with an open WebSocket, the web client would try to recover the session and switch to Ajax web services from websockets. The “Sync” call would then bounce rapidly between the client and the server and would start all available sessions with userid= “.NET” and websocket “BROKEN” due to the cookie being expired.  All web service calls have been hardened to prevent this and the user will now simply get an expired cookie message.
• For ASCII sessions, users can now right-click on the cursor block and have the ability to select “Paste” for clipboard operations (same as Control-V but with a mouse instead of keyboard action).
• For sessions connected to ASCII host profiles with scroll history configured, the scroll history area now supports Clipboard copy using the start copy Icon. If a user selects text in the scroll area, on releasing the mouse button, a context menu will appear that includes a new “Copy All” which will copy everything from the top of the selection area to the bottom of the scroll area and the active terminal 24 or 25 rows.  This enables users to copy a large report to the clipboard that may have scrolled extensively into the history scroll area.
• Javascript is now minimized using Google Closure instead of Yahoo YUI Compressor to enable the use of modern Javascript features as we move ahead from support of Internet Explorer and its limitations.
• Google Authorization errors are now logged to the Event Log to assist in identifying user connection problems.
• Tightened-up AzureAD connection authorization to ensure stale AzureAD sessions are re-authorized on starting a new session.
• FVTerm now logs to the Event Log the active Security Framework on startup of the Application Pool.
• When Printing and the report is 132 columns or greater, the print preview window will now display in Landscape mode (previous versions printed correctly but the preview was rotated 90^o so that the user needed to tilt their head to read the report in the preview window).
• Printer fonts that could be configured for 80, 132 and 160 column reports using the Profile / Advanced section for HTML printing were not being used in the web client, so these settings had no effect. Fixed in this release.

Profiles Mode Configuration – config/Admin.html Page

• Added a new Profile / Advanced setting: Print Page Size for HTML print screens and also device printing that is not using PCL-to-PDF (SCS 3270/5250 or ASCII text-only printing). The CSS controlling the page creation will work better when the “local” page size is set.  Default is “Letter: 8.5 x 11” while other options include “Legal 8.5 x 14”, “A4: 210 x 297mm” and “A3: 297 x 420mm”.
• Added new Web Server / Security setting: “Session Cookie Expiration Days” that has been defaulted to 1 day. With this setting more than a day can be entered to accommodate environments where longer session connections are expected by users.

Inventu Viewer Administration Console and MMC Console

• If a User closes a browser tab with an active session when sessions are configured to stay active on browser close, the new Web Socket column will display “OFFLINE” instead of “OK”, “New”, “BROKEN” or “API”.

Inventu Viewer Diagnostics Dashboard

• Start of tracking for FVTerm Web Application Pool Event log entries—this will enable better support for Identity Framework issues such as an expired AzureAD certificate or Google Identity internet access issues.

Reorganized and Re-written Documentation, Continuous Fixes and Enhancements

Inventu Viewer+ Base Product and Components

(Version: 6.0.88 March  2, 2023)

Inventu Viewer Documentation

• Installed documentation starting with the main help has been reorganized with many new sections which better support installation, configuration and administration of the Web Terminal Emulation environment.
• Added new help to support the Diagnostic Workbench and common support issues
• Added help to the Inventu Viewer Microsoft Management Console Snap-In now accessible with the F1 key or help menu options

Inventu Viewer Emulation Service

• Replaced the “Warning” column in reporting session details with the “WebSocket” column to better support understanding of network health. In customer situations where network components are impacting quality of service, web sockets are usually the best indicator of network quality.  This column will display the following values:
  • OK – The websocket is connected with no recent errors
  • ERR-[n] – [n] Web socket errors have occurred since the session started. This number may be higher than expected if a session has been active for many hours.  The session is still using web sockets so there has been healthy activity in-between the errors
  • BROKEN – There were enough errors close together that the connection has been switched to AJAX web service calls. If many sessions have BROKEN it means there is a general failure in a network component somewhere in your network.
  • API – the connection is for a server-side web service or other process (not FVTerm) and so no websocket is involved
• Added Event Log entry for when a 5250 device name is rejected by the host (this improves diagnostics for session initialization errors that only users could detect and report)
• Updated support for Windows Performance Counters including rename to Inventu Viewer Performance Counters from Flynet Performance Counters
• Updated SChannel TLS API calls to active structures (previous versions used structures that have been deprecated)
• Added Event Log entry for when a 5250 device name is rejected by the host (this improves diagnostics for session initialization errors that only users could detect and report)
• Improved automatic creation of data transfer and host device printing folders adding creation of “XFersFrom”, “XfersTo” and “SessPrintFiles”
• Metered license support was still using the HTTP port to communicate metering activity to the Inventu website—updated to HTTPS
• Some ASCII Viewpoint fixes for box drawing and cursor location limits
• Some internal synchronization calls had additional error checking implemented.

FVTerm Web Terminal Emulator

• View and Profile Access Control has been expanded to include Oauth2 OpenID Connect and SAML 2.0. Previous versions only supported access control for Windows Security and Google ID User Authorization.  See the Profiles Mode Configuration for details.
• Function Key Identification was enhanced to support the pattern of a dash in addition to an equals and space following a function key name (F3-Exit is now highlighted for click like F3=Exit).
• Added ability to edit emulation style CSS files when accessing the FVTerm web application on the server (localhost). This is managed with a new Icon (color wheel magnifying glass) that previously enabled simply viewing a field’s active CSS style settings.  With the new enhancement, administrators can edit click on a field to edit it’s active style as found in the selected color option (such as the standard 3270 style).   Adding a new CSS file is still a manual operation where an existing CSS file is copied with a new name, then added with a text editor to the CSS list in web.config.
• For 5250 and 3270 sessions, a new option set in the Profile “Numeric Only Locking” will support host applications that have fields restricted to “numeric only” but in fact need users to be able to enter alpha characters. When Numeric Only Locking is set false for a profile, users will no longer be stopped from entering alpha characters (when true a user needs to override for each field set as numeric only).
• There is a setting “Clipboard Copy Mouse Activation” which has the default true—the timeout has been increased from ½ second to a full second to avoid undesired switch to the clipboard rectangle drawing. This is also now settable with “Clipboard Copy Mouse Activation Press Milliseconds” if more than a second is desired.
• The wrong HTML character name was being used for the dash/minus resulting in display errors for certain fonts.
• Websocket error handling tweaked to better capture exceptions
• Websocket errors now reported to the Inventu Viewer Emulation service to enable tracking of websocket / network health

Profiles Mode Configuration

• Changing the FVTerm Access Security Type in the Web Server tab will now set the User Connection Identity setting to match the optimal source based on the security type.
• For SAML 2.0 added “SAML 2.0 Security Groups Claim Name” defaulting to “groups” which enables identifying the identifier of the claim that represents a user’s group or roles membership.
• For OAuth2 OpenID Connect added “OpenID Connect Security Groups Claim Name” defaulting to “groups” which enables identifying the identifier of the claim that represents a user’s group or roles membership.
• Added “Obtain Security Groups from Provider” to enable control over the group lists used in View and Profile access control. This includes an option to utilize the Microsoft Graph API to obtain active groups from AzureAD as well as an option to define the list with the new property “Security Group Names for Access Control”
• Added “Security Group Names for Access Control” which is active when “Obtain Groups Names from Provider is set to “Manage Group Names Here”. This is a list that can be edited to define the group names used for access control to Views or Profiles.

Inventu Viewer Administration Console

• Active Sessions now report web socket health in farthest column to the right (replaces “warnings” which were generally of limited value)

Inventu Viewer Microsoft Management Console Snap-In

• Contextual help has been added so that the F1 or Help menu options can provide help on how to use the Inventu Viewer MMC snapin
• Active Sessions now report web socket health in farthest column to the right (replaces “warnings” which were generally of limited value)
• When updating a Cluster node the title of the dialog now reflects that action
• Added Server Actions to View and Repair internal Cluster User and Session Linked-Lists (Chains) to address rare situations where the Chains can be in error condition
• The Session Viewer (Terminal Emulator) can now have the host keys remapped the same way that the Recorder V2 supports (button at bottom of the screen accesses the keyboard remapping popup)
• Added Support for Accessing server management port using HTTPS — This was implemented to enable Helpdesk and other users to access the Inventu Service management port from other servers besides the localhost (on the server).  At this time the Inventu Viewer Service HTTP port does not support HTTPS but Inventu can provide a simple configuration file for use with STunnel to provide the external HTTPS access.
  • When adding a Server to the View, can now check that the Port is HTTPS
  • When defining or updating a cluster, each server can now be accessed with a custom port and HTTPS
  • The help for configuring STunnel at the server to front-end the FlyServer.exe console port has been added to the software.inventu.com help at https://software.inventu.com/help/html/stunnel/index.html

Notification Tray Icon

• On a live production server, active HTTP requests to the FVTerm Application Pool were causing initialization of the FlyServer service shared memory to fail during restarts (even when recycle of the FVTerm Application Pool is selected). The logic has been improved so that the FVTerm Application pool is stopped, the Service is restarted and then the Application Pool is Started back up.

Diagnostics Dashboard

• If an expected diagnostic folder is missing this version will create it and only display an error message if the creation fails.
• Exception handling added for startup Registry Reads that in some cases caused a startup failure.
• Continuing improvements including recommended actions based on discovered events and active probes
• Diagnostic Dashboard independent executable created that is downloadable by customers with older versions of both Flynet Viewer and Inventu Viewer-available on request to all Inventu customers with active maintenance or subscription.