The Official AIA Blog

Session: Jedi Masters Reveal
Foundation Pack Best Practices
Building Process Integrations

at

Oracle OpenWorld
Tue, Oct 13, 2009 @5:30pm
Moscone West L3 Room 3008
Pre-register: Session ID S311197

AIA is now on Twitter. Follow us @OracleAIA for News, views and implementation best practices from the Oracle Application Integration Architecture team.

It's that time of the year again. Be sure to visit Oracle OpenWorld 2009 at San Francisco October 11-15, 2009. There is going to be a lot of focus on AIA (see this pdf containing a list of all AIA focused sessions), so do schedule this during your visit.

Shameless plug: I will be covering the AIA implementation best practices in a session entitled "Jedi Masters Reveal: Foundation Pack Best Practices--Building Process Integrations" at Moscone West (L3) Room 3008 on Tuesday, Oct 13 @5:30pm. Search for it on the site using the Session IDS311197 to pre-register.

See you there!

The 10.1.3.3.1 SOA Bundle Patchset (MLR) are cumulative patches on SOA Suite and are released every 2-3 months. The latest is MLR#18 (Patch 8372118) and all AIA 2.0.1 implementations should upgrade to this for better system stability. This has more than 300 fixes on the base platform.

Recently after upgrading the system to MLR 18, we observed an issue where CustomerPartyEBS is timing Out after invoking CreateCustomerPartyPortalProvABCS. This is not easy to debug as you can not find the instance of CreateCustomerPartyPortalProvABCS process in BPEL console and there is not much information in log files as well. The fix for this issue is mentioned in Metalink Note 880473.1.

This is also liked from AIA Implementation Resources on Oracle Wiki

In a typical SOA deployment, there are a number of services deployed and thousands of messages exchanged on any given day. Howsoever we design our services and optimize the service deployment infrastructure, exceptions do happen. These exceptions can be broadly categorized as System Faults and Business Faults.

AIA Error Handling Framework captures all the exceptions in a consistent manner and provides notification capability out of the box to notify appropriate people about the exception. This enables them to analyze the exception and take appropriate corrective action.

AIA Email notifications can be configured in as little as 15 minutes following these 4 steps;

1. Define appropriate Users and Roles

For a given exception, the service SLA may require you to notify different users. You may need to notify different people for system errors, network issues etc. and different people for business errors such as data validation or CreditCheckFailed etc. AIA provides an XML based user repository (JAZN), but you could also configure your existing user store such as LDAP to define various roles of system users, integration admin, participating application admin etc.

If you are using JAZN,

• Update “$SOA_HOME/j2ee/oc4j_soa/config/system-jazn-data.xml” file to define roles and users. AIA defines default AIAIntegrationAdmin role and AIAIntegrationAdminUser out of the box.
• Update “$SOA_HOME/bpel/system/services/config/user-properties.xml” file to populate various attributes for these roles and users. Ensure to provide a valid email address for your domain.

2. Associate Roles to a specific Exceptions

AIA provides ability to notify different roles based on process name, service name, system id and error code. You can setup these notifications on AIA Console -> Setup -> Error Notification screen. For more information, see Oracle Application Integration Architecture Core Infrastructure Components Guide, "Setting Up Error Notifications for Oracle AIA Processes". It also explains the logic used to determine notification roles for an error.

If no appropriate role is defined for a certain error, AIA notify the default role (AIAIntegrationAdmin) defined in AIAConfigurationProperties.xml file.

3. Configure Email channel

Update “$SOA_HOME/bpel/system/services/config/ns_emails.xml” file;

• In the <EmailAccounts> element, set the “NotificationMode” attribute to “EMAIL”, instead of “NONE”.
• In the <GeneralSettings> section, set the <FromAddress> to a valid email address for your domain.
• In the <OutgoingServerSettings> section, set the correct <STMPHost> and <STMPPort> for your domain.
• Comment out <IncomingServerSettings> section if you do not have a need for it.

4. Restart BPEL Process Manager

Now you should see email notifications triggered for every error in the AIA system.

Oracle SOA Suite 10g supports five channels of notifications, Email, Pager, Fax, SMS and Voice. AIA provides an implementation for Email notifications, but it is easy to configure any other channel and provide custom notifications if needed.

Unlike X-Men, XMAN is not a fictitious super hero but its powers are amazing. As part of AIA Developer Tools, it allows you to introspect the mapping structure in complex XSL transformation and presents a user friendly report in HTML and CSV format. This empowers the functional and technical analysis of the code to resolve technical governance issues of consistency in attribute mappings and XREF/DVM usage.

Some of the Benefits are:

• Functional interoperability between PIPs.
• Jumpstart projects and encourages reuse by using existing mapping information.
• Enhances productivity by helping populate design time EBO mapping spreadsheets.
• Assist with PIP upgrades by identifying custom extensions.

Viewing the HTML report is useful for viewing one service at a time; however there are times when we need to see the attribute mappings across connectors to ensure semantic consistency or to ensure all related connectors are using same XREF and DVM. For this purpose, AIA allows to download the consolidated report in CSV format and you can follow the below steps to import it in MS Excel,

• Open a new Excel spreadsheet file.
• In the menu bar, select Data -> Get External Data -> From Text. (Text - to - columns in Excel 2003 and prior versions)
• 'Import text file' dialog box appears. Choose the csv file which you want to import.
• 'Text import Wizard' dialog box appears. Choose 'Delimited' option in the 'Original Data Type' selection. Click 'Next'.
• Select 'Other' check box and enter '~' in the text box. Click 'Next' and Click 'Finish'.
• Put appropriate column headers as following,
  Custom, ServiceType, FileName, EBO, Application, Service, Operation, Source Xpath, DVM, XREF, Target Xpath, EBM, ABM

Now you may go about creating pivot tables and analyze DVM and XREF usage. One example to show the number of a particular XREF table usage in any service for a given application would be to create a pivot table and; select Service & Operation as "Report Filter", select Application as "Column Labels", select XREF as "Row Labels" and select ABM as "Values".

Similarly, you may analyze a specific attribute usage or DVM usage.

Look for XMAN at AIA Implementation Resources wiki

While the number of implementation resources available for AIA - Metalink notes, white papers, best practice documents, tips and tricks, tools, templates etc. - are all extremely helpful in implementations, the challenge has been in actually finding this information. Based on popular request, we have put together all these resources on a single page, now available on the Oracle Wiki. Please visit this page for all your implementation needs, and leave a feedback if you find it useful, as well as if you find any information missing that would be helpful if linked to that page.

Link to AIA Implementation Resources on Oracle Wiki

One of the challenges in SOA implementation is visibility of SOA artifact inventory. A limitation in visibility will limit service reuse. To promote visibility of SOA artifacts i.e. Foundation Pack (FP) and Process Integration Pack (PIP) artifacts, AIA provides BSR (OER in FP 3.0). BSR allows you to search for services and other artifacts from a top down perspective. However, in many instances a top-down approach may not solve the problem and you may want to adopt bottoms-up approach. To aid PIP developers and analysts alike, AIA provides another tool which is called as XMAN (XSLT Mapping Analyzer). XMAN is a tool that introspect the mapping structure in complex XSL transformation and presents a user friendly report in HTML and CSV format. You an down load this tool from Metalink

The report shows ABM (Application Business Message) X-path , DVM (Domain Value Map), XREF (Cross-Reference) and EBM (Enterprise Business Message) X-path. A sample report of XMAN -

Here are some of the best practices that are adopted by Oracle PIP Developers. If you are new to PIP and want to know what to look for when mapping Enterprise Business Message (EBM) in your XSLT transformation, please follow below best practices.

Dos:
 Select EBO based on Business Concept and not based on number of fields that match.
 Use Specification group cautiously, avoid if possible.
 Customize EBO for missing fields/Business Concepts
 Use Predefined corecom: prefixed Elements or DataTypes for customization.
 Refer to XMAN reports for understanding XREF/DVM and functional mapping of existing connectors
 Map Flags to Indicator types.
 Map fields semantically.
 Signup for FP and 2 day EBO training.
 Use appropriate Operations (EBMs).

Don'ts:
 Do not map just based on Data types
 Do not map just based on field name.
 Avoid creating your own data types.
 Don't Customize if Custom stub is not present.

If there are multiple instances of a packaged application that has the same business capability in a customer eco system, how many ABCS connectors do we need to integrate them?

The answer is, regardless of the number of application instances for a packaged application, AIA recommends to build only one ABCS connector for that packaged application to perform a specific business task.

It is the responsibility of the routing rules defined in the EBS that will orchestrate the message to the appropriate instance of the application.