Cloud Integration Part 4: Design Patterns by Joel Perez and Arturo Viveros

February 5, 2017 Leave a comment

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In this fourth and last chapter of the Oracle Cloud Integration Series, we will go through a series of design patterns, which should facilitate the implementation of scenarios similar to those explained in chapters 2 and 3.

These patterns are proven solutions to the multiple challenges posed by Cloud Integration requirements. Besides explaining them, we’ll also attempt to establish a relationship between them and the toolset provided by the Oracle stack.

We’ll review the following patterns:

Multi-Device Broker

  • Service State Management
  • Service Agent Architecture

All of these patterns also support and comply with the characteristics, deployment and delivery models mentioned in the first chapter, so let’s describe them one by one:

Multi-Device Broker

Cloud integration will most likely require our services, whether they are cloud-based or on-premise, to interact with multiple devices, components, channels and protocols. This can automatically lead to lack of inter-operability among the various elements of such scenarios, necessitating conversion/transformation logic as part of our integration workflows, and surfacing hidden integration costs–and, in some cases, tight coupling and vendor lock-in.

Take a look at the following interface-enabled, Enterprise Application Integration(EAI) style architecture for a cloud integration scenario: Read the complete article here.

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Integration Cloud Service (ICS) – How to use Upsert Operation by Shalindra Singh

February 4, 2017 Leave a comment

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Oracle launches ICS around April, 2015 and is being accepted by customer well. As customers started using ICS for  Salesforce Integration,  one question was observed and asked by lots of customers, is related to Upsert operation usage. We will dig deep into this in this blog.

Salesforce to ERP Integration common scenarios are –

  1. Account and Contact Sync
  2. Product and Price Sync
  3. Opportunity or Quote to Order (Sales Order)
  4. Order Status Update back to Salesforce.com
  5. Invoice Data Transfer to Salesforce.com

Other Integration flows include, History, Attachments,  Warranty, Cases, etc…

In most of the scenarios where data needs to be inserted or updated into Salesforce.com, recommended operation is Upsert to be used. When Upsert Operation is leveraged, Salesforce SOAP API automatically check based on external Id defined whether incoming record exists or not; if it does exist then record gets updated or else inserted. Click here for more information on upsert operation.

But when you start using Upsert operation with any standard or custom objects from Salesforce.com, by default, external id is not defined in Salesforce.com. So if you have decided to use upsert operation in an integration flow, first thing to do is to define / create external id in the object(s) you are planning to use with upsert operation.

Creation of External ID:

External Id is important parameter for upsert operation. To avoid data duplication external id should be created with utmost care. Best practice suggests to use foreign key (unique key) as an external key. if foreign key is composite key, external key should also be composite. It allows you to create or update a record and relate it to another existing record in a single step instead of querying the parent record ID first.

Let’s take an example here. consider I am working on Account Sync and I am bringing customers master data from ERP to Salesforce.com. So to create external id in Account object, login to Salesforce.com and then navigate to setup -> App Setup -> Customize -> Account -> Fields. To create a new fields, click on new button on this page. Select the data type (for example Text) and click to Next. Provide name for this external id field (appending ext_id in the name is considered best practice) and select external id check box on this page as shown in the below diagram. Read the complete article here.

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Integration Cloud Service (ICS) Security & Compliance by Greg Mally

February 3, 2017 Leave a comment

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The attached white paper is the product of a joint A-Team effort that included Deepak Arora, Mike Muller, and Greg Mally.  Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS) runs within the Oracle Cloud where the architecture is designed to provide customers with a unified suite of Cloud Services with best-in-class performance, scalability, availability, and security. The Cloud Services are designed to run on a unified data center, hardware, software, and network architecture. This document is based on the Cloud Security Assessment section of the Security for Cloud Computing: 10 Steps to Ensure Success V2.0 document, which is produced by the Cloud Standards Customer Council where Oracle is a member. Read the complete article here.

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Integration Cloud Service: How to keep all data residing in your applications in sync? by Philipp Langer

January 30, 2017 Leave a comment

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Because things in IT change fast, it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish the important trends from the less important. And that’s true for Oracle as well. It’s not that long ago when Oracle CEO Larry Elisson thought of Cloud Computing as just another short-living fashion trend (great audio by the way). But that began to change soon. And at least since Oracle OpenWorld 2015 we know for sure how serious Oracle became about Cloud Computing.

“The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.” – Larry Ellison, chairman, Oracle

Today, Oracle’s stack on the Cloud is complete. From infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to software as a service (SaaS) there is everything. But especially with all those wonderful SaaS products being available (and probably being used by your line of businesses) new challenges arise: How to keep all the data residing in those applications in sync? In other words: How to integrate those products? A neat way to address this is the Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS) which I would like to introduce to you in this blog post.

Besides ICS I’m also going to mention two other integration services provided by Oracle namely SOA Suite Cloud Service (SSCS) and Process Cloud Service (PCS). Though for this blog post I won’t go into much detail there.

Integration Cloud Service

The main reason to use Oracle ICS is to map and synchronize data between all different kinds of SaaS applications. For example, you might use Salesforce as your primary CRM application but another one for ERP activities such as order and invoice tracking. In such a case, if a new customer is created in Salesforce it should be created in the ERP application as well – automatically and immediately.

The attentive reader might be wondering whether Oracle ICS is limited to cloud integrations. The answer is no. Hybrid integrations are supported as well but more on this later.

ICS Components

Based on the main menu, functionality in ICS is organized into four main views: home page, designer portal, monitoring (dashboard) and administration. Before going into detail of monitoring functionality and administration, let’s have a look at the Designer.

As you can see, the designer portal in turn is organized into five views: Integrations, Connections, Lookups, Packages and Agents. You might notice as well how clear and simple the UI appears. That clearly indicates the target audience of ICS: not only developers and IT but LOB users as well. Read the complete article here.

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Benefits of Automated Oracle FMW Provisioning by Arturo Viveros

January 26, 2017 Leave a comment

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Oracle Fusion Middleware provisiong is always a critical prerequisite which will substantially influence the success or failure of our development projects. Those of us who have spent many years working with this toolset in its many versions, should know for sure what a distressful experience it is to work with sloppily or incorrectly provisioned environments.

Provisioning can also consume a lot of our precious time, whether it is performed locally or in controlled environments belonging to our organization / customer. As the components have evolved, setup options have also become increasingly complex and diverse (although maybe friendlier from a UI perspective), and even though we may have mastered this craft and are capable of producing a nice and shiny configuration, replicating this consistently and for multiple environments where we can expect high variance regarding product versions, particular requirements, limitations and criticality levels, is without any doubt a very challenging and potentially error-prone endeavor. Add dependencies, intangibles and deadlines to the mix and this can become as complicated as any other project task.

Nevertheless, for the time being and with all the tools at our disposal, this provisioning processes can be easily streamlined and automated, so we can stop the suffering while also learning some really exciting stuff and providing value to our organization / customer.

Automated provisioning: what are we looking for?

This “value” we’ve mentioned may represent lots of things when talking about an optimized provisioning cycle, for example:

  • Agility / Speed: which will also translate into developer productivity, time to market and enhanced DR / scaling capabilities.
  • Consistency / Standardization: so we can focus mostly on resolving business-oriented challenges rather than tripping up with environment-related issues.
  • Change management: being able to evolve our environments by patching, upgrading and fine tuning in an orderly fashion, and without the fear of it collapsing like a house of cards at the minimum alteration.
  • Competency building: so your team will be able to learn, perform and improve well-delimited and highly repeteable tasks rather than playing “heroball” (where everyone and everything ends up depending on a single engineer’s prowess and availability, sound familiar?)

So, which options do we have?

There are so many, but let’s talk about some of them and provide some examples and references. For instance, we will always have the good old config wizard: Read the complete article here.

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Oracle publishes official Chef and Puppet samples on github by Mark Nelson and Edwin Biemond

January 25, 2017 Leave a comment

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Oracle official sample Chef cookbooks and Puppet modules are now available on Oracle’s official GitHub page at https://github.com/oracle/chef-samples and https://github.com/oracle/puppet-samples for Java, WebLogic and Fusion Middleware.

Chef and Puppet are arguably the most popular provisioning frameworks and we would like to help you with your WebLogic and Fusion Middleware provisioning by publishing samples for Chef and Puppet.  The Chef and Puppet sample modules and cookbooks are almost the same and are using the same development frameworks.

We start this series of posts with an introduction what these cookbooks and modules can do and provide a simple quickstart how to create a WebLogic domain in Chef or Puppet on a Windows, Linux or Solaris host. In the following posts we will install FMW software, patch and extend a domain with FMW software.

These Chef cookbooks and Puppet modules allow you install WebLogic together with Fusion Middleware on any Linux, Solaris or Windows host. The cookbooks should work in Chef 11 & 12 and can be used with Chef server or with Chef Solo. The modules should work on Puppet 3 & 4 and it should not matter if you use Puppet Enterprise, an agent or just use puppet apply.

The first release on github will contain the following cookbooks and modules:

  • fmw_jdk, installs JDK 7 or 8 and optionally configures the urandom random number generator service for Linux distributions.
  • fmw_wls, installs WebLogic 11g or 12c and optionally create thes Oracle user and group on solaris and linux.
  • fmw_bsu, patches a WebLogic 11g middleware home.
  • fmw_opatch, patches WebLogic 12c or any Fusion Middleware 11g, 12c product.
  • fmw_inst, installs FMW 11g, 12c product including Oracle SOA Suite, Service Bus, MFT, OIM, ADF Runtime, and WebCenter.
  • fmw_rcu, creates a 11g, 12c Common or SOA Suite FMW repository on an Oracle Database.
  • fmw_domain, creates a domain in development mode, configures the node manager, start the admin server and extend the domain with ADF/JRF, Service Bus, SOA Suite and optionally with BAM and Enterprise Scheduler.

A couple of important notes about these cookbooks and modules:

  • They don’t download any (free or licensed) software from OTN, Oracle support or edelivery, this is the responsibility of the user/customer.
  • Oracle Support won’t support these cookbooks or modules but you can raise issues or send us pull requests on github.
  • Binaries should be locally accessible in a directory or a network share.
  • They will create a domain only in development mode.
  • They won’t do multi-node provisioning like pack/unpack of a domain on cluster nodes.
  • Passwords in Chef can be defined in databags and in Puppet you need to do it yourself in Hiera.
  • They have dependencies to each other and will automatically include or require the depended manifest or recipe.
  • The default recipe/manifest does not do anything, you have to use the specific recipes or manifests. In Puppet the default manifest will be used to set some module defaults.

Detailed overview

These cookbooks and modules contains recipes and manifests with resource/providers in Chef and type/providers for Puppet. The recipes and manifest are a quick way to get you started and these minimal recipes are just calling the matching resource/type providers. You can call these yourself in one of your own cookbooks. Read the complete article here.

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XA Transactions with SOASuite JMS Adapter by Martien van den Akker

January 25, 2017 1 Comment

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JMS is perfect for setting transaction boundaries and in OSB it is pretty clear on how JMS transactions are handled. However, in SOASuite using the JMS adapter the SOA Infrastructure is handling your JMS transactions by default; and messages are removed from the queue rightaway because the Get’s are Auto-acknowledged. If something fails, you would expect that messages are rolled back to the JMS queue and eventually moved to the error queue. But, again by default, not with the SOASuite/JMS Adapter. In that case the BPEL process, for instance, fails and get’s in a recovery state, to be handled in the ‘Error Hospital’in Enterprise Manager. But I want JMS to handle it! (Says the little boy…)
So how do we accomplish that? Today I got the chance to figure that out.
Start with a JMS setup with a JMS Server, Module and a Queue with an Error Queue that is configured to be the error destination on the first queue. On the first queue set a redelivery limit to 3 and a redelivery delay on for instance 60000 ms (or something like that). I’m not going in to that here.
Create also a Connection Factory in the JMS Module with a proper jndi, something like ‘jms/myApplicationCF’.
In the JMS adapter on SOASuite there are several OutboundConnectionFactories already pre-configured. It is quite convenient to use the one with JNDI ‘eis/wls/Queue’. But if you look into that, you’ll see that it uses the default WebLogic JMS Connection factory ‘weblogic.jms.XAConnectionFactory’. Not much wrong with that, but you can’t configure that for your own particular situation. But more over it is configured with ‘AcknowledgeMode’ = ‘AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE’. As you can read in the docs there are three values for the AcknowledgeMode:

  • DUPS_OK_ACKNOWLEDGE, for consumers that are not concerned about duplicate messages
  • AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE, in which the session automatically acknowledges the receipt of a message
  • CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE, in which the client acknowledges the message by calling the message’s acknowledge method

So create a new outbound connection factory, with a JNDI like ‘eis/jms/MyApp’. 
Now, apparently we don’t want  ‘AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE’, because that would cause the message-get acknowledged ‘On Get’. So you could rollback until ‘Saint Juttemis’ (as we say in our family) but it won’t go back on the queue. Dups aren’t ok with me, so I’ll choose ‘CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE’ here. Then there’s another option: ‘IsTransacted’. I want that one on ‘true’. Then in ConnectionFactoryLocation, you’d put the JNDI of your JMS Connection factory, in my example ‘jms/myApplicationCF’. So you’ll get something like: Read the complete article here.

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SOA & BPM Partner Community Webcast – January 31st 2017 Oracle B2B and evolution to API Driven B2B

January 24, 2017 Leave a comment

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Attend our January edition of the SOA & BPM Partner Community Webcast live on January 31st 2017 at 16:00 CET.

Oracle B2B and evolution to API Driven B2B

This session will present an overview of Oracle B2B platform and show a demo of the current functionality. Oracle B2B is a highly available, high-performing B2B platform that is being used by major customers across different verticals such as retail, supply chain, and utilities. Hear from Product Management about the product overview, architecture, and best practices. Also hear about how B2B integration is evolving into an API driven B2B and hear about Oracle’s vision and roadimage map.

Krishnaprem Bhatia
Twitter: KrishnapremB

Krishnaprem Bhatia is product manager in the Cloud Integration product management team focusing on B2B, Healthcare and API Management products. He has over 15 years of work experience in software development and product management. As a product manager at Oracle he has worked extensively with customers and partners worldwide in all industry verticals. He holds Computer Science & Engineering and MBA degrees and loves to read, travel and work out.

Call ID: 6965489 Call Passcode: 333111

UK: +44 (0) 208 118 1001 & United States: 140 877 440 73

More Local Numbers

Schedule:

January 31st 2017 at 16:00-17:00 CET

Visit the registration page here.

 

Missed our SOA & BPM Partner Community Webcast? – watch the on-demand versions:

· SOA 12 & BPM Suite 12c Roadmap update November 29th 2016

· Microservices October 25th 2016

· Oracle OpenWorld 2016 update September 27th 2016

· API Cloud Platform Service August 30th 2016

· BPM Suite & PCS Update July 26th 2016

· Integration Cloud Service June 28th 2016

· Sales Plays Webcast June 9th 2016

· Real-Time Integration Business Insight May 31st 2016

For the latest information please visit Community Updates Wiki page (SOA Community membership required).

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Flex fields Mapping Tool by BPM SOA Solutions Team

January 22, 2017 Leave a comment

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How many times have you had to repeat the same sequence in the BPM workspace to map a Human Task payload attribute to a public Flex Field? Let’s do a bit of re-cap:

  1. login to the Workspace with administration permissions
  2. go do Administration
  3. go to Public Flex Fields
  4. create all Labels

And then, for each human task:

  1. search for the task
  2. choose the payload attribute
  3. search for the label to use (you can create them here as well)
  4. repeat until you’ve mapped all the labels you need
  5. save and move to the next

It seems like a lot of work to do and it is fair to say that our platform team was not very happy to do these tasks manually. Even when developing these mappings need to be re-created from time to time (more often than we wished). The whole process is furthermore error-prone, specially when moving from development to QA and to Production environments.

Automating the creation and mapping of labels and payload atributes

Oracle BPM/SOA 11g and 12c expose an API for managing labels and mapping them as required. The oracle.bpel.services.workflow.runtimeconfig.IRuntimeConfigService interface provides a series of methods for creating and deleting labels, as well as creating oracle.bpel.services.workflow.runtimeconfig.model.PayloadMapping instances to map a label to a payload attribute. Read the complete article here.

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Unable to compile a composite that contains a Java embedded activity with Maven by Markus Lohn

January 21, 2017 Leave a comment

 

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Maven is not compiling the composite when a BPEL process contains java embedding. Just incorporating java embedding makes the maven compilation to fail. If the java embedding is removed then the composite compilation is successful in Maven. This issue can be reproduced  with JDeveloper 12.1.3.x

Research

First I tried to solve this issue by adding dependency declarations for orabpel.jar in the soa maven plugin section and the pom.xml itself. However this approach doesn’t solve my issue. After another research in the Oracle Support system I found two interesting notes:

  • Unable to compile a composite that contains a Java embedded activity with Maven (2050971.1)
  • Failure when compiling a BPEL process in SOA 12c, ‚package com.collaxa.cube does not exist’ (2112178.1)

Both notes describe exactly the issue I currently have. The note 2050971.1 contains a reference to the bug no. 20229616 wherefore no patch is available until now. But it contains a description for a workaround. The workarounds means to put every needed Java library in the folder SOA/SCA-INF/lib. From my perspective that isn’t an appropriate solution, because the missing classes mention by the compiler are in orabpel.jar. This jar file is part of SOA Suite and already available on the infrastructure side. Moreover everything in /SCA-INF/lib is part of the composite and uploaded to MDS. The second support note 2112178.1 references a patch, but it doesn’t also solve the issue. Due to this I build a solution that automates the workaround with SOA/SCA-INF/lib by using Maven plugins.

Solution

The solutions contains 3 steps:

1. Using the Maven Dependency Plugin to copy the orabpel.jar to SOA/SCA-INF/lib folder. The copied orabpel.jar will be renamed to only4compile.jar. Further it is important to bind the execution of the plugin to a phase before running the Maven SOA Plugin. Read the complete article here.

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