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Kapow Katalyst Platform:
Business Rules and Data Transformations

Business Rules and Data Transformations


Business Rules

Most business processes today depend on business applications, documents and content.

As applications and data spread on the web, inside and outside your firewall, using a standard web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari), to perform business processes has become standard practice.
As processes evolve, both as part of developing the business or as part of improving efficiency, process workers, IT managers and business analysts are increasing the demand for automating processes and integrating disparate applications or documents.
Translating these business needs into traditional IT solutions is not easy, but it’s also often impossible because more and more applications are out of “reach”, and thus cannot be recoded to implement new functionality or new APIs.

Katalyst Application Integration Platform uniquely solves this pain by making it easy to translate any browser-based or document-based business process steps directly into process flow-charts directly replicating users processes against documents, data and any application on the web, even when no documented API exists.

Business Rules

Here are a few examples of business rules that can easily be automated in the Katalyst Application Integration Platform:

  • Loop over items in a list (for example a list of products, URL’s, pages or accounts) and perform different actions on the different items based on rules
  • Login to a secure FTP server, loop over the file system and perform action based on content type, date of creation, etc. The same can be done on local file systems as well
  • Load an Excel file, loop over each line in a spreadsheet, extract and map the different columns to a new data format, including mapping based on if-then-else structures. For each row open up a 2nd application and automatically fill out forms and submit the data. For example to update user information in an HR system
  • Call the twitter REST API based on dynamic search terms, check if the data contains certain tags, and if yes,  repost on Google+
  • Log in to your Microsoft Outlook server, check for new mails arriving from a customer, open the email and fill the information into a form in a business application, then submit the information, read the answer and create and send a return email
  • Login on behalf of a user to any web application, discover and act upon any error that occurs, for example by wrong user credentials
  • Check numeric values for validity or range and perform action based on different outcome

Data Transformation

Data is everywhere, but it's locked in apps, databases, extranets and intranets, XML and CSV feeds, SOAP and REST services, FTP sites, and Flash, Excel, PDF and Word files. And it's diversified in form and format, including structured data (such as database files), unstructured data (such as emails or interview answers), data-bearing graphics, and a variety of languages. To be useful to your business, all this data must be transformed and normalized so it can be integrated with your existing databases and systems.

Kapow Katalyst offers the industry's most robust, comprehensive data transformation and normalization capabilities, including:

Text and code strings
(A "string" may come from any source of data Kapow supports; for example, text on a web page, HTML on a web page, JavaScript, etc.)

  • Regular expressions to transform text
  • Extract, format and manipulate strings, substrings, and string operators that can index data or insert or extract special characters
  • Manipulate strings in multiple locales including double-byte character sets
  • Automatically encode and decode string elements such as ampersand, URL, and Base64
  • Convert binary to text and back
  • Map values to lists (e.g., the two-character representation of a state to the full state name)
  • Replace text and patterns, transform case (upper, lower, proper), remove spaces, remove non-printable characters
  • Convert types (e.g., strings to dates and back)

Numbers

  • Specify arithmetic operations (virtually all mathematic operators are supported), including rounding and MAX/MIN
  • Apply numeric format patterns (e.g., decimal and thousand separators, number of decimal places)
  • Generate random numbers
  • Compute the MD5 checksum of some input
  • Generate globally unique Ids (GUIDs)

Date/Time

  • Automatically transform date formats into the desired date/time format
  • Transform dates from websites in double-byte character sets in multiple locales
  • Extract any date/time element out of a date (e.g., the year, day, or hour)
  • Work with 12 or 24 hour time and take time zone into account
  • Perform date calculations (to get time between dates or modify dates using date arithmetic)
  • Get the current date, time, weekday, etc. at any point in a robot process
  • Automatically extract dates/times from websites that display it in the form "3 hours ago" or "2 days ago" into standard date/time types

HTML/XML

  • Anything listed above for "strings" in general also applies to HTML
  • Remove all types of a specific tag from HTML
  • Count the number of a particular tags in a string of HTML
  • Convert a string of HTML into formatted text with many automatic formatting options including whether to include URLs, text alternatives to images, etc.
  • Transform between relative URLs and absolute URLs
  • Perform XSL stylesheet transforms on XML using an XSL template

Moreover, for greater power and flexibility, you can conditionally perform all of the above transformations with unlimited if-then/else conditions (e.g., if a string contains "xyz" then extract from it using regular expression "A" else extract from it using regular expression "B").