A new milestone release (1.6.0) is now available for the Test Bed's RDF, XML, JSON and CSV validators.

Release 1.6.0 is now the latest available milestone release for the Test Bed’s RDF, XML, JSON and CSV validators. Milestone releases complement the validators’ continuous delivery model that provide rapid access to latest changes, by offering stable versions for users hosting validators on their own infrastructure. The highlights of this latest release are summarised below.

Validator report items can now include limited rich text content, including HTML links, as part of their descriptions. If such links are defined they are presented as such and can be clicked to open their target in a separate browser tab.

Supporting links in report items allows users to lookup detailed information in separate documentation such as online specifications and project wikis.

Validators can now be configured with aliases for the provided validation types for use through the REST, SOAP and CLI APIs. Defining aliases allows validator developers to provide interesting aliases that will remain unchanged such as supporting a “latest” option. In addition, it enables backwards compatibility when refactoring validation types (for example splitting types into several sub-options), as developers can define the previous types as aliases for the latest ones.

The XML validator now supports applying an XSLT transformation to inputs before validation. This enables validation of inputs provided by different sources that may vary in terms of their precise structure. In this case a transformation step can align such inputs to the common expected syntax upon which the common validations can take place.

The XML validator now allows Schematron validation to take place after the main input has been combined with additional user-provided context files. This effectively means that we can validate multiple inputs in one go and check for consistency issues, such as validating together request and response messages. Moreover, input combinations are highly configurable by means of template files.

All validator Docker images are now built for both linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 architectures.

Practically this means that validators can also be ran by users on Apple hardware.

Besides its main highlights, this release also provides an opportunity to make available additional minor improvements:

• All validators’ HTTP headers were adapted to align with best security practices.
• Handing of Base64-encoded strings now also supports RFC 2045 (MIME).
• User-provided validation artefacts can now be provided via editor.
• RDF syntaxes are now supported for validation in the XML and JSON validators.
• The JSON validator can now report the count of validated objects in case of arrays.

The full list of improvements and bug fixes is available in each validator’s change history documentation (see for RDF, XML, JSON and CSV).

The table below provides the relevant reference links for each validator. For the detailed list of updates introduced by the latest release check the change history links.

Remember that you can automatically receive updates for new milestone releases by either subscribing to the Test Bed community and configuring your notification preferences, or by subscribing to the validators’ GitHub repositories.

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The Interoperability Test Bed is a service provided by the European Commission’s DIGIT, offering conformance testing and validation solutions in support of IT systems’ cross-border interoperability.