at
Oracle OpenWorld
Tue, Oct 13, 2009 @5:30pm
Moscone West L3 Room 3008
Pre-register: Session ID S311197
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 ID
S311197 to pre-register.
See you there!
]]>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
]]>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,
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;
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.
]]>Some of the Benefits are:
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,
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
]]>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 -
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.
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.
Below section describes Identification structure usage.
1. BusinessComponentID - This is a unique key for the application agnostic representation of the object instance. This is generated by the API provided by the Oracle AIA infrastrucutire. Within XSLT you would call populate XREF API to generate this key value. Hence these values will be stored in XREF table.
2. ID/ContextID - This is the business friendly (i.e. the one that has business context identification) identifier present in the participating application for this particular object instance. For example, PO number and Sales Order number.
3. ApplicationObjectkey - This is the Primary key of the participating application which is internally generated unique key for this particular object instance. For example, PK-Order-ID or Worker_ID.
4. AlternateObjectKey - Different ways of Identifying the same object instance. Use this element to capture additional information about the key. For example, GrouID in General Ledger entry or CONSECUTIVE_BILLING_NUMBER in Invoice. Not all Identifications may have this field populated.
Further, to define the environment in which an identifier is valid, a set of attributes that describes the validity of the key is supported in addition to the actual key value.
1. schemeID - Attribute schemeID provides information about the object type identified by the ID, for example ItemGUID for the GUID of an item and PartyGUID for the GUID of a party. For the BusinessComponentID, the schemeID is set to the name of the object followed by ' GUID'. For the ID, the schemeID is set to the name of the element as known in the participating application.
2. schemeVersionID - This describes the version of the identification scheme.
3. schemeAgencyID- This is the ID of the agency that manages the identification scheme of the identifier. The GUIDs generated by Oracle AIA will have AIA 01 populated in this attribute. For identifiers generated by participating applications, the short code for that of the participating application will be stores in this attribute.
In EBS Provider flows, the data sent into the PL/SQL API gets inserted/updated into the user's language specific row in TL tables. So AIA layer needs to set the FND APPS context or use the correct integration user in Oracle Apps Adapter. This can be done based on EBM Header's language code using which we can set the integration user dynamically, say using a DVM or some configuration mapping.
In Requestor flows, again an EBS API returns data in one language at a time. Most of the EBS APIs return data based on the user preferences set in FND APPS context. So AIA layer needs to set the FND APPS context or use the correct integration user in Oracle Apps Adapter for each language, and then call the PL/SQL API.
For EBS Interface tables, generally no language specific rows are maintained for transaction data i.e. whatever data gets inserted into the Interface table, the same data is pushed into the EBS product tables based on User language set in the calling session. So AIA layer just need to insert data into the Interface table, and then before calling the Concurrent Program or any post-processing API, FND APPS context need to be set.
In Oracle EBS, DATE fields do not store timezone information and are supposed to be in EBS server timezone. In all UI transactions, it is assumed that the EBS User Interface will convert from User (client) TZ to EBS server TZ while pushing data into db, and from EBS server TZ to user TZ while pulling out data from db on to the UI.
The same principle can be applied for AIA based interface with EBS. In AIA Provider ABCS, AIA layer (client for EBS) should first query the EBS server TZ or have it as a configuration property (there already exists a "Ebiz" module property EBIZ_01.SERVER_TIMEZONE in AIAConfigurationProperties). It should then convert the incoming xsd:dateTime value in the EBM to EBS server TZ, and then pass the converted date value to EBS APIs as a DATE field.
To convert between timezones, EBS Integrations has developed and made available a generic custom XPath function ebi:getConvertedDate() which has been used in a couple of PIPs; similar methodology can be adopted in other PIPs. To get TZ from xsd:dateTime field, a bpel function can be used - timezone-from-dateTime(). In order to get EBS server TZ, following query can be used:
select timezone_code from fnd_timezones_b
where upgrade_tz_id = fnd_profile.value(’SERVER_TIMEZONE_ID’);
[While calling EBS APIs using Oracle Apps Adapter, currently EBS doesn't support timestamp with timezone type in PL/SQL API signatures. So the dateTime field (including TZ) in Enterprise Business Message (EBM) cannot be directly mapped and passed to EBS API. Even if one tries passing a date with timezone to a DATE field in PL/SQL, Oracle Apps Adapter does an automatic timezone conversion to the timezone where the JVM is running which can lead to incorrect results.]
Similarly, in Requestor ABCS, while retrieving data from EBS, AIA layer should query the EBS server TZ, and then convert the retrieved DATE from EBS server TZ to EBM/AIA TZ. The EBS wrapper API can be made to return in GMT always, or it can be made to return in a specific TZ(configurable at AIA layer) passed into it as input parameter. In case of direct query from db, the SQL can be written to return the date value in GMT or in the configured TZ.
There are scores of information available on AIA through various sources such as OTN, Metalink, Guides, White Papers, Blog articles etc. Few places to start are:
There is some interesting information available on Metalink such as, EBO Implementation Maps for Oracle AIA Release Vehicle 2.4, Installing AIA on Cluster, AIA Developer Tools, Platform Certifications and AIA etc.
1. Are you using the right version of JDK?.
Each version of Foundation pack is certified with a different version of JDK. Verify the installation guide and metalink notes to check for the most recent version. The last version of Foundation pack was certified on JDK 1.5 update 16
2. Does the DB user have DBA privileges?
The DB user entered during interview screens should have privileges to create a db schema. ‘sys’ user usually has all the required privileges.
3. Is directory browsing enabled on the server?
Check the install guide for information on how to enable directory browsing on your server.
4. Is your ESB working properly?
a. Ensure ESB design time and runtime are accessing the following urls.
http://host:port/esb/dtStatus.jsp
http://host:port/esb/rtStatus.jsp
both the pages should return a true.
b. Deploy a sample ESB process from ESB Console and execute it to check the results.
c. Create a sample ‘system’ from ESB Console.
d. Ensure virtual host and port of BPELSystem and DefaultSystem are set appropriately in ESBConsole.
5. Is your BPEL PM working properly?
a. Deploy a sample BPEL process and verify the flow eg: LoanFlow demo.
b. Verify if you are able to login to BPELConsole and navigate across various pages
Note: remember to undeploy the samples and delete the previously created system.
6. Verify that you don’t have any existing applications in your SOA cluster starting with “default_”.
For example if you had deploy the LoanFlow demo, it would’ve created such applications.
To check this
i. Open the EM Console
ii. Navigate to the container
iii. In the Applications tab, drill down from BPEL>orabpel.
iv. Select any application starting with “default_” and undeploy