Introducing Design Room ONE Version 2.1

The latest Sprint 2020.26 bring us a new version 2.1 of Design Room ONE available for HCL RTist users. In this new version authentication functionality has been significantly improved and lost its EXPERIMENTAL tag.

One of the improvements includes refactoring the way the Design Room ONE server integrates with Keycloak for authentication. As a result, the configuration procedure is now easier: all the settings that need to be updated are now located in Design Room ONE’s main configuration file – server-config.json.

Due to these improvements, there is now no need for Design Room ONE to store a Keycloak administrator key making this integration even safer, since Design Room ONE server would only be able to access pieces of Keycloak information it needs to manage access to its designs.

You can refer to Authentication Setup for detailed instruction on migrating Keycloak realms configured with previous versions of Design Room ONE without loosing any information about users and their roles.

Another update related to server configuration is the introduction of a single property dr_db_url controlling database connection — provides more flexibility and allows using password protected databases, which are standard in cloud environments like Azure or AWS.

This is since version 2.1 Design Room ONE supports integration with Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) tools version 6.0.6.1.

If you are using CLM tools to track your requirements with CLM 6.0.6.1 (read System Requirements for the full list of supported versions and other requirements) you would be able to create “Derived From” links in your modeling tool e.g. HCL RTist from a model element to a requirement.

These links will be visible in Design Room ONE after the model has been exported to the server. After that matching “Derives Architecture Element” links will be visible in your requirements management application and you would be able to create “References” links from say a requirement or a testcase to a model element published in Design Room ONE.

It is also possible to configure Keycloak integration to use the same Jazz Authorization Server (JAS) that is used by your CLM suite. This will allow users to authenticate with JAS when exporting the models and in web browsers it would be enough to authenticate once to access both CLM and Design Room ONE resources.

The procedure of configuring Keycloak identity provider is described in detail in Authentication Setup document.

The full list of improvements includes many more, for example the version of jQuery library used to render Design Room ONE web pages has been upgraded to 3.5.1 to improve security. Also, slot values for attributes in class InstanceSpecifications are now shown in the Properties view.

And the deployment script deploy-dr.js, which usage is described in Installation Instructions document, has been improved to report deployment name in all messages related to the server, this will help in cases when you want to run several Design Room ONE server instances on the same machine.

This video also provides these important updates.