Use of correlation sets in SOA Suite by Martien van den Akker

Years ago, I had plans to write a book about BPEL or at least a series of articles to be bundled as a BPEL Course. I stranded with only one Hello World article. This year, I came up with the idea of doing something around Correlation Sets. Preparing a series of articles and a talk. And therefor, let’s start with an article on Correlation Sets in BPEL. Maybe later on I could pick up those earlier plans again.

You may have read "BPEL", and tend to skip this article. But wait, if you use BPM Suite: the Oracle BPM Process Engine is the exact same thing as the BPEL Process engine! And if you use the Processes module of Oracle Integration Cloud: it can use Correlation Sets too. Surprise: again it uses the exact same Process Engine as Oracle SOA Suite BPEL and Oracle BPM Suite.

Why Correlation Sets?

Now, why Correlation Sets and what are those? You may be familiar with OSB or maybe Mulesoft, or other integration tools. OSB is a stateless engine. What comes in is executed at once until it is done. So, services in OSB are inherently synchronous and short-lived. You may argue that you can do Asynch Services in OSB. But those are in fact "synchronous" one-way services. Fire & Forget, as you will. They are executed right away (hence the quoted synchronous) , until it is done. But the calling application does not expect a result (and thus asynchronous in the sense that the caller won’t wait).

You could, and I have done it actually, create asynchronous request response services in OSB. Asynchronous Request Response services are actually two complementary one way fire & forget services. For such a WSDL both services are defined in different port types: one for the actual service consumer, and one callback service for the service provider. Using WS-Addressing header elements the calling service will provide a ReplyTo callback-endpoint and a MessageId to be provided by the responding service as an RelatesTo MessageId. Read the complete article here.

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Data Stitch: Repeating element path does not have a predicate for selecting 1 instance – Warning by Jorge Herreria

Summary

The "Repeating element path does not have a predicate for selecting 1 instance." warning message will come up on some stitch statements; specially on the "Variable" field.   It means the Location Path XPath expression will select more than one instance and then the operation (Append or Assign) will fail at runtime.

In this blog I’ll try to explain how to read the warning and how to fix the expression.

There is a lot of XPath and XSD Schema lingo in this post; however I’ll try to explain it with less lingo that I can. Wish me luck.

Expect twisted humor here and there; more of then than none.

A quote that I like: "If you want to be free, stay anonymous…"

The meaning of the warning

Lets start peeling the onion (warning) into heads and tales and then put it back together… I’m going to use an example and simulate a conversation with you.

The example orchestration the $input_RESPOSE is a Shopping Cart.  The Stitch statement with the warning is trying to assign 123.99 to the item’s price. See the pic below. Read the complete article here.

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Data Stitch: Append and Assign for repeating elements by Jorge Herreria

Summary

Data Stitch has ASSIGN, APPEND and REMOVE operations. Some use-cases are easy to grasp; some others require a little thinking… On this blog I‘ll explain behaviors I deem they are not straightforward to derive the outcome for using Data Stitch in a OIC Orchestration:

· Assigning into unbounded elements (aka – Repeating Elements)

· Appending instances into an unbounded element and how to complete the data.

I assume you are familiar with XPath Expressions and XSD Schemas, because there is a lot a lingo in this post…

You will not see many screen shots. My goal is to give you the concepts so you become a good data “tailor?”

Expect some twisted humor here and there; more often that none.

I love this quote:  Perfection is boring; therefor laugh at your mistakes.

Syntax

For Data Stitch Sentences

(TO XPath expression).OPERATION(FROM XPath expression)

Example:

($v1/ns0:customer/ns0:name).ASSIGN(“Jorge Herreria”)

On explanations you will see step/step/step/… in location paths. I’m going to omit the namespace prefixes, and just put the local-name on each step; looking to make it easy to read… However on actual XPathExpressions you’ll see prefixes. Read the complete article here.

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Recursive calls in Oracle Integration Flows (Scenario: Paginated API calls for large Data Sets) by Jang-Vijay Singh

A number of use-cases can be implemented cleanly using a recursive approach. This post is not to debate the pros and cons of recursion versus looping but provides a simple approach to achieve this.

For scenarios such as the ones listed below, and possibly more, this approach is quite efficient, concise, maintainable, and most importantly, it is highly scalable. It also leaves a smaller runtime footprint with a smaller execution time per instance than a looping flow instance. This also makes error handling easier as I will describe later.

• Polling (continuously monitoring an FTP location, a database, or an API output)
• Paginated API’s (when the target system exposes an API with a paginated* interface such as the eBay findProducts operation)
• Retryable flows

Paginated Calls

Many software systems store large sets of data. For instance, a vendor might have hundreds of thousands of products and product-prices listed on EBay or an eCommerce store. They might have millions of transactions in their PayPal account.

There might occasionally be legitimate scenarios to fetch all of this data. The software system can provide various interfaces to export such data in bulk. Such a bulk data export interface could be raw data files, access to a database, but also a standard API like a Rest Service.

For reasons of performance and good practice, such Rest API’s (typically a GET operation) would limit the amount of data returned in any one call by using a pagination strategy. An eCommerce store could list hundreds of thousands of products for instance, and it wouldn’t be appropriate to return such a large data set in a single call. A pagination strategy would involve setting parameters like pageNumber and pageSize. Read the complete article here.

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Global Variables and Data Stitch in Oracle Integration by Ankur Jain

This article covers the two most important features which Oracle announced recently. One of the features allows us to create Global Variables that are available throughout the integration. The feature is part of feature flag “oic.ics.console.integration.complex-variables“. The variable can be one any types as below:

• String
• Boolean
• Date
• Date Time
• Object
• Number

Global Variables

• Another feature is Data Stitch which allows us to create assignments of complex type (Object) variables. This feature is part of feature flag “oic.ics.console.integration.stitch-action“.

The minimum Oracle Integration version required for the feature is 200113.1400.33493.

Enable two feature flag on your OIC instance to enjoy these features:

• oic.ics.console.integration.stitch-action
• oic.ics.console.integration.complex-variable
• Read the complete article here.

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Integrate SaaS hands-on Bootcamps Webtraining for Asia, South America, India and US

Do you want to find out why Gartner named Oracle as a Leader in Magic Quadrant for three years in row? Are you able to innovate quickly in the new digital world? Are you looking for ways to integrate systems and data faster using a modern cloud integration platform? Attend the Oracle Integration Bootcamp, a three days hands-on training for Oracle partners!

Oracle Product Management is pleased to invite Oracle Partners to attend a 3-days hands-on workshop on how to integrate with ERP & HCM applications using Oracle Integration Cloud. This Invite-Only hands-on workshop will be delivered at No-Fee to Partners. It will consist of presentations, demos, and hands-on labs.

Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) offers Integration, Process Automation and Visual design capabilities that help business analysts and IT specialists to automate end to end business processes across departments. Oracle Integration Cloud offers a simple recipe to be successful in this application integration and process automation journey: Build, Integrate and Engage.

Schedule:

• Asia December 1^st-3^rd 2020
• South America November 17^th-19^th 2020
• India November 10^th-12^th 2020
• US & Canada October 26th-28th 2020
• Asia October 19th-21st 2020

Get the latest OIC training material here (community membership required).

For additional location please visit our website here.

Can’t attand a hands-on bootcamp? Watch on-demand webcast:

• Connect, Innovate, Extend SaaS KickOff Webcast 2020
• Cloud Platform KickOff Webcast 2020
• ERP Integration with Application Adapters
• HCM Integration with Application Adapters
• Integration Adapters
• Integrate SaaS

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Testing REST trigger-based Integrations in OIC Console by Sumit Tomar

Test Integration feature allows users to test an App-driven integration with REST trigger by invoking it directly from OIC without relying on a third party software.

How it works

Activate the Integration.

Click on "Run" link.

A popup will be displayed as below.

Click on Test link to go to Test Integration page.

Test Integration page will have 3 sections: Operation, Request, and Response.

Operation and Request section will have the endpoint’s metadata populated.

Operation

Operation section contains Operation option(if Integration trigger is configured with multiple operations) along with HTTP method and relative URI (for the selected operation in case of multiple operations). Read the complete article here.

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OIC –> Netsuite Asynchronous Request Processing by Niall Commiskey

Another feature supported by the OIC Netsuite adapter – With asynchronous requests, your client application sends a request to SOAP web services, where it is placed in a processing queue and handled asynchronously with other requests. Your client application does not wait for a response but goes on to other work. After a job is submitted, a job Id is returned in the SOAP web services response. Your client application can then check on the status and result of the request by referencing the job Id.
Asynchronous processing may be advantageous in the following situations:
– If you expect your connection to NetSuite to be slow or unstable.
– If your job is large, and its processing can be postponed until off-peak hours.
Be aware that asynchronous responses may not be returned immediately. Before committing to using
asynchronous operations, you should consider this factor and decide whether it fits in with your business logic.
Above description taken from the Netsuite Web Services doc here

Here is a very simple example of leveraging this feature, when creating a new customer.
This is the synchronous version of such an integration, now to change this to asynchronous –

Step 1 – Add an Assign Activity to create the following 2 variables.
They will be used later on. Read the complete article here.

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HCM Data loader in Oracle Integration by Ankur Jain

Oracle Integration Cloud leverages HCM adapter to load data into HCM via the Data loader option. HCM Data Loader is a powerful tool for bulk-loading and maintaining data. The data can be from any source. You can use HCM Data Loader for data migration, ongoing maintenance of HCM data, and coexistence scenarios, where core HR data is uploaded regularly.

The article focuses on how to use an HCM adapter to load data into HCM.

Useful link

ERP Adapter in Oracle Integration Cloud

Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing Adapter in OIC

HCM Adapter in Oracle Integration

YouTube channel to learn via videos

Below is the use case which I’m going to cover here:

• Create a scheduled integration
• Pick up a Worker zip file from FTP location
• Use HCM adapter to load the data file
• Use the HCM adapter to extract the status of the data loader job.

Follow the below steps in order to achieve integration.

• Create a scheduled based integration and name it as “HCM_Data_Loader_Integration”

Configure FTP to read Worker file

• Drop the FTP adapter on the canvas just below the scheduled activity to read the Worker zip file.
• Read the complete article here.

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OIC and Netsuite –> Custom fields revisited by Niall Commiskey

This post again is mainly note for myself – however, others may also find it useful! Here I detail how to create a new custom field in Netsuite. This field will hold the ecological rating of the customer – one of the following values –
A, B, or C. I create what is known in Netsuite as an Entity Field. I also created a new List Record to hold the valid values of A, B and C. I apply this field to the Customer object. Now to the Display settings – read the complete article here.

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