PaaS Community Blog

Using Business Events in E-Business Suite to send messages to other applications via ICS by Naveen Nahata

Introduction

In this article, I will discuss and demonstrate the use of Business Events in E-Business Suite (EBS) to integrate it with other applications using Integration Cloud Service (ICS). The Oracle Workflow Business Event System is an application service that leverages the Oracle Advanced Queuing (AQ) infrastructure to communicate business events between systems. This functionality is leverage by ICS to register a subscription with EBS for an event which is invoked when the event is triggered. In this article I’ll explain this in detail. ICS provides Oracle SaaS customers with pre-defined to connections to most SaaS subscriptions and zero-code integration features to quickly connect SaaS applications.

Prerequisites

E-Business Suite can be installed in a customer’s data center or on OMCS or on IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service). It may be installed allowing access from Public Internet, or behind the firewall where access is restricted to only within the corporate network. In case where EBS is publically accessible, ICS can integrate with EBS directly.

However, when EBS is only available within the corporate network, ICS has no connectivity to EBS. In such cases, connectivity can still be established by the use of on-premises connectivity agent. Whenever ICS needs to connect to EBS, it write the message to a queue. The connectivity agent is installed on-premises and it polls ICS periodically and passes the messages to EBS. This is a prerequisite to use ICS with EBS for any kind of integration use case. For instructions on how to install connectivity agent, please read this article

In case of Business Events, connectivity agent helps automate the process of registration of ICS integration which needs to be invoked when the even fires. When an integration in ICS which uses EBS Business Event as a trigger is activated, ICS registers the integration as a subscriber to that particular Business Event. Since ICS cannot directly communicate with EBS, if it is behind the firewall, it writes the message to a queue which is read by the connectivity agent which in turns registers the integration as a subscriber. Once the subscription is created, EBS can directly invoke the integration with the event payload since the firewall blocks incoming connections to EBS and not outgoing HTTP(s) connections from the EBS to ICS.

There are other tasks that you need to perform on EBS before it can be used with ICS for integration using Business Events. These steps include setting up Integrated SOA Gateway REST Services, deploying the required REST services, setting up ICS credentials etc. To perform the required setup, please follow the instructions in page Setting Up and Creating an Oracle E-Business Suite Adapter Connection of Oracle E-Business Suite Adapter documentation.

Main Article

For this article, I’ll take an example where there is a requirement to keep Trading Community Architecture (TCA) data in sync between EBS and Oracle Sales Cloud (OSC). EBS is on-premises and behind the firewall so it cannot be accessed from internet. I will demonstrate how to use ICS to achieve this real-time integration.

The high level series of steps will be:

1. Create an Agent group in ICS

2. Download the connectivity agent installer from ICS and install it on a separate server. This agent will help receive messages from ICS and pass them to EBS. Read the complete article here.

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For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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Integrating the Chatbot by Léon Smiers

In this blog we look at the specific aspects of Chatbots and elaborate on its four integration parts. Read our previous blogs in this series: Why Chatbots, Maturity levels and Intelligence.

Chatbots are like any other application; they have a need for integration. In basic form the Chatbot integrates with the Channels, the Intelligence Providing systems, Backend systems  and it offloads Usage information for later improvements and intelligence determination.

All four integration parts have their usage patterns and (non functional) requirements for usage in the Chatbot solution.

Here we go through the details of each integration parts and considerations that need to be made during the design of a Chatbot solution.

Channel integration
Integration with channels firstly is about the job of acting as a funnel for many devices all communicating with the bot engine. As human interaction is a fraction of the speed of the ability for the engine to process the dialogue we need a more contemporary integration model that doesn’t tie up resources such as threads for each stream of interaction such as the models that Kafka and Node.js support. Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

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Interfacing with HCM (or other file source) via FTP – ICS Definitive Tip #8 By Phil Wilkins

The techniques for integrating Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) and several other Oracle SaaS solutions can require the use of Oracle Transactional Business Analysis (OTBI). The need for OTBI comes down to the fact that to  access to the relevant data an API is not available. OTBI can be configured to generate a report and then transfer the report using FTP. When the report needs to be consumed by ICS then an obvious FTP location is needed. One such option to hold a file for ICS to retrieve is the FTP server provided with the SaaS services (details here).

However,  it has come to light that the original intent for this FTP service was for holding bulk data intended to be used for ‘priming’ your HCM instance. As a place for staging data for ICS is in the mid to long term it isn’t recommended. The roadmap for the SaaS product team may result in removing the FTP server.

FTP Data Staging

So the question begs, where should we put the data coming out of OTBI to be consumed elsewhere? Well the next option would be to use Oracle’s Managed File Transfer (MFT). Although historically listed with SOA Cloud Service (SOA CS), it is independently priced and has  become a 1st class citizen of the PaaS family more recently. For MFT to be an option it needs to include an FTP server which it does. But MFT also has the abilities for doing a number of orchestration processes, such as calling web services when files are ready. Read the complete article here.

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For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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Oracle API Platform: Best practices for 3rd Generation API Management – Webcast April 17th 2018 16:00 CET

Join this webcast to meet the 3^rd Generation Oracle API Platform Cloud Service. In this short session, you will learn how a sleek, intuitive full lifecycle API Platform built on Oracle’s proven gateways will improve productivity and effectiveness in your business.
Learn how you can leverage this true hybrid offering to:

• Focus on the full API lifecycle, starting with Design & Governance, all the way through Security, Discovery & Consumption, Monetization, and Analysis, to develop APIs and create modern applications and user experiences.
• Develop an API-First strategy to accelerate digital transformation, safely extend the reach of intellectual property, and create new revenue streams.
• Leverage an open, heterogeneous environment with an easy-to-use platform that is compatible with open standards
• Best practices API management

Speakers:

Luis Weir CTO Oracle DU Capgemini UK

Robert Wunderlich Oracle HQ Director Product Management

Jürgen Kress Oracle EMEA PaaS Partner Adoption

Schedule: April 17^th 16:00 CET 2018

Please register here: www.tinyurl.com/API3rdGeneration

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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ICS Pricing – ICS Definitive Tip #9 by Phil Wilkins

ICS pricing is based on two aspects – the number of connections and the number of messages processed.  But what constitutes a connection?  What happens if I exceed the number of messages or connections?

Number of Connections

The overall model for ICS pricing is on page 34 of Oracle Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service – Public Cloud Service Descriptions-Metered & Non-Metered. The key definition for a Hosted Connection is on Page 9 of this document.  The critical wording for the connections is:

A Connection is counted per unique application, data source, third party software, Oracle software, Web Service or REST end point to which the Oracle Integration Cloud Service is connected. SOAP or REST Web Services that have the same base URI (combination of host and port) are counted as one Connection.

So you can define for example two ICS connections (one in and one out for example, or one per operation) to the same service aslong as the basic part of the URL e.g. icsallpurpose-xxxxxx.integration.us2.oraclecloud.com  is the same. The ports will typically only become a countable to the same URL if you use different protocols e.g. HTTP, HTTPS, FTP. This simply comes down to the fact different protocols typically use different ports.  But, if I daisy chained integrations within the same ICS instance; then assuming they are all HTTPS calls they would only consume 1 connection. This is regardless of how many different connections created to provide the full path.  This is also important as when transitioning versions of end points you may need the current and previous endpoints available, which within this model would count as the same connection as typically the version identifier is in the subsequent path. Read the complete article here.

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Building an Oracle Integration Cloud Service Integration in 2 Minutes by Robert van Molken and ACE Associate Phil Wilkins

Oracle ACE Robert van Molken and ACE Associate Phil Wilkins, authors of "Implementing Oracle Integration Cloud Service," (2017, Packt Publishing) demonstrate how to create an OICS integration in just 2 minutes. Watch the video here.

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Registries: Use Cases for API Management and Microservices by Phil Wilkins

Microservices and new 3rd-generation API Management capabilities are very natural technical partners. A (micro)service provides the execution logic for a single capability and 3rd generation API Management provides the means to control the exposure of each service to the outside world, and potentially between the (micro)services as well. Luis Weir’s article, 3rd-Generation API Management, explains the evolution of the API Management capability, and what the 3rd generation offers that makes API Management mesh well with (micro)services. For this article, though, we are going to explore the role of registries in a (micro)services environment and ultimately their relationship to API Management. We aren’t going to dive deeply into any specific solution, although we will reference some of the better known options, and provide links to where you can dig in further.

You’ll note I have referred to microservices as (micro)services. This is very deliberate, and possibly contentious.Microservices are typically associated with certain technologies such as Docker and lightweight app containers such as Tomcat, but from my view point if you’re going to be a purist about microservices, then (as with SOA) you need to think about the design paradigm and the principles—NOT the technologies. It is with this view point we often have to work as, unless you’re fortunate to be working in a services organization that is very enlightened or just plain fortunate, the decisions and constraints you have to work with will mean you need to make some pragmatic decisions. An organization that has made heavy investment in WebLogic licensing isn’t likely to be comfortable in giving it up—but this doesn’t mean you can’t adopt a microservices approach, although certainly you need to mitigate risks that using WebLogic can create when adopting the architecture. Secondly, the concept of registries isn’t unique to microservices; in fact, some of these solutions have origins in solutions such as Big Data/Hadoop offerings, for example.

To underline my point, Gartner has started to talk about mini- or micro-apps as a flavor of microservices. The essence of this is the application of microservice principles but in a more pragmatic manner—not every organization needs hyperscaling and super elasticity like the poster children of microservices (e.g., Netflix and Uber). But we all do need the means to easily manage the addressing of services.

To understand the role of a registry, we need to step back and understand some of the ideas underpinning microservices. So let’s just recap: Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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