It’s been a while since I posted an update for the iRule Editor so I figured I’d spend some time this week polishing off some of the bugs and enhancements reported on the iRule Editor forum over the past year or so.

So, I can go on and on about the history, but I figure you all just want to bypass that and go straight to what’s been fixed/added since the last version.  We’ll here’s what I’ve got for you in the latest v0.10.0.0 distribution that I released today.

FIX:  Hyperlink click crashes iRule Editor

This was reported in this thread titled iRule Crash.  In the text editor window, the iRule Editor has some special tokens that allow you to click on them and launch a browser to take you to the appropriate documentation webpage for that token.  On some windows system, the registry settings for the default browser were not where I expected them to be.  I removed this registry lookup and relied on the system to determine for me the default browser application.  This works much nicer now!

FIX: Disable auto-configuration saving if the user is in a roll that doesn’t allow it.

Manager roles do now have access to the ConfigSync.save_configuration() iControl method to flush the running configuration to disk.  In the past, an error dialog would display on every save command.  The iRule Editor will now assume you have privileges to do so and if it encounters an error saving the configuration, it will use a new “Auto-Save” flag configurable in the “Tools.BIG-IP Config” menu item.

FIX: iRule Property Virtual Server assignment not persisted to disk.

For some reason, I omitted the call to ConfigSync.save_configuration() on the iRule Property dialog when assigning virtual servers.  Now, on an OK in the dialog, a save operation occurs.

ENH: New “Tools.BIG-IP Config” menu to control BIG-IP configuration saving.

On this menu, you can trigger a manual config save and control the auto-save option.

ENH: HTTP Proxy Server support for Connection Dialog

As implemented in the iControl Assembly, the connection dialog now supports a HTTP proxy for iControl connections to your BIG-IP’s management port.  I had a hard time testing this so please let me know if it works B-).

ENH: Application Self Updates

Since removing the ClickOnce deployment from the iRule Editor setup, there hasn’t been an easy way to check for new versions of the Editor.  With this release, there is an new program installed with the Editor called iRulerUpdater.exe that is called by the iRule Editor’s “Check For Updates” command.  You should never see this unless a new update is available on the site.  BTW, if you want to check for the latest version yourself, you can do so by querying http://devcentral.f5.com/labs/iRuleEditor/iRulerCurrentVersion.txt.

ENH: New GTM syntax tokens in the editing window.

Thanks to Jason, we’ve got an updated list of GTM iRule tokens in the lexer configuration for the Editor.

There’s also a few hidden Easter eggs in there that I didn’t want to enable for the general population.  Let me know if you find out how to enable them. B-).

So, enough said…  Head over to the iRule Editor Labs page and download the latest version and let me know what you think.

Oh, and don’t forget, the source is available as well if you want to dig in and add some features yourself.  I’m always happy to receive changes and incorporate them into the main distribution.

-Joe