Author: admin

On Saturday, February 26 we performed the scheduled February maintenance on our Mustangserver REST API which included the following:

• We moved the VM to a physically different (newer, bigger) server in a different data centre of the same provider, of course remaining in Germany. You should not even notice the change, although you may notice api.usegroup.de and gw.usegroup.de resolve to a new IP address.
• There is now a manual for Mustangserver 0.8.0, adding the brief description how to write Order-X files

We now use the host system firewall, which should give us more security

additionally, in the past weeks

• we renewed our SSL server certificate
• Quba’s validation feature was unfixed from 0.7.0 and now always uses the most up to date version
• we shut down Mustangserver versions prior to 0.8.0
• we performed a usability test on the Mustangproject homepage, had the obligatory data protection awareness training for our employees and we
• further improved monitoring: apart from monitoring our infrastructure (i.e. network, system, and the API server) we now also monitor the Mustangserver process

We will most likely do some un-down-timish updates in the meantime, e.g. Mustangserver 0.8.1 will be released in the near future and support to convert from plain PDF to PDF/A-3. It will be an additional parameter which will be backward compatible. PDF/A-3 files can be surprisingly smaller than PDF/A-1 ones.

If all goes well there will be no scheduled maintenance neccessary for March or April. Unless otherwise communicated the next scheduled maintenance with a small downtime will take place on Saturday, May 6th, 2023, again from 15:00-16:00 CET. The reason is yet another SSL certificate update which requires us to restart the API management process.

Today, February 13th, 2023 we released Mustang 2.6.1 with the following

New Features

• allow prepaid amount in invoice class
• allow Bank credentials without BIC

Corrections for small profiles

• allow minimum profile without delivery date

“Systemic corrections”

• return error code not only on validation but also on recursive directory validation
• toolchain.xml now only required on `mvn release:release` not already on `mvn package`
• upgraded dependencies jackson-databind from 2.13.4.1 to 2.14.2 and xmlunit-assertj from 2.9.0 to 2.9.1

Today, Monday, February 6th 2023, we published version 0.8.0 of our e-invoicing REST API service Mustangserver.

It adds support for reading and writing orders in Order-X using the format code “ox” in the operations invoice2xml, parse and extract. invoice2xml writes and parse reads JSON data for which the same structure like for invoices is used.

The validation of Order-X files using Mustangserver was already previously available.

Order-X is the sister format to Factur-X, while in Factur-X, invoices, corrections and credit memos can be expressed in a both human and machine readable way, Order-X does the same for orders. Currently the most recent version 1 of Order-X supports the profiles Basic, Comfort and Extended.

Today, 23rd of January 2023, we published the first manual for Mustangserver 0.7.0, including “How can I register”, a PHP sample client and chapters e.g. on Postman and JMeter.

Mustang 2.6.0 “Joyeux Noël”, released December 23rd, 2022, supports trade parties without neccesarily providing a postal address, as allowed e.g. in France. It also improves the “Minimum” profile (also popular in France) by e.g. automatically hiding invoice lines, applicabletradetax, linetotalamount, paymentreference etc. if active. Due date and delivery dates are also no longer mandatory for credit notes. An issue in the deployment has been fixed (#297), Svante provided the hope of server based tests and weclapp-dev thankfully contributed the fix to another null pointer exception. Together with the fact that attempts to use the minimum profile would previously usually also be accompanied by nullpointers, one could almost say that this version comes with 20% less nullpointer exceptions 🙂

Merry Christmas, or better Joyeux Noël to all of you and your families.

On Montag, November 28th the oAuth-functionality in Mustangserver, announced for November, was published.

Affected are Docker and Inhouse installations only, ordinary access already previously
used oAuth on the API management.

New beta users, however, benefit from the self-registration introduced on November 19th.
Previously new users subscribed to the mailing list and subsequently received username and initial password, now they can sign up directly (by following this link and clicking “Create Account” on the bottom left) at the Mustangserver API Management, receive a confirmation link by E-Mail, can immediately login and are added to the mailing list later.

Mustangproject version 2.5.7, released November 7th, 2022, works again in Java 1.8 and improves the validator (EN16931 checks are now also run on “Basic” profile) as well as the importer: ZF1 invoices can now be imported in the invoiceimporter and some getters were added to the ordinary importer.

Saturday, October 8th, we published the new functionality announced for October in a new endpoint, “PDF”, to create PDF/A-1 files from any input PDF provided. These can be plain PDFs, or even PDF/A-1 or PDF/A-3 files.

This re-renders the vector graphics in the PDF so it should actually work from any input PDF. Rumours have it that there can only be issues with class-1 fonts: Feel free to send me samples. A good validator to check the output is e.g. VeraPDF.

Of course all pages will be converted but embedded files will be stripped, so if you want to update the XML structure of an existing Factur-X PDF you can pass that in and afterwards perform another combine operation.

First subscription

Please note that despite we’re still in beta this is not a reason not to subscribe for the commercial support (500 Eur/year), actually we were able to welcome our first customer last week. We’ll shortly go live with details and a dedicated page to subscribe for commercial support. Please note that at the end of the beta, only users with commercial support will be provided access to the live system.

Version 1.2.0 of the free e-invoice-viewer Quba, published today, September 26th, 2022, continues to work offline, but can now also connect to Mustang Server, to validate invoices, confirming their syntactical and mathematical correctness.

The September release “Version 0.5” of Mustang Server was already published on Saturday, September 24th. Additionally to it’s own validator, it adds support for the Open-Source PHIVE validation engine, useful e.g. for UBL and Peppol invoices. As regards future planning, a PDF to PDF/A conversion feature is expected in October and a native integration of OAuth2 (currently available via it’s API Management) is expected for November.

Mustangproject version 2.5.6, released today, September 22nd 2022, adds some Javadoc documentation and removes a unneccessary dependency.