Recover unsaved changes for an Integration edit session

This blog is for a new feature coming out in Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) November release.

Due to many unforeseen circumstances, integration developers can lose their work while editing integrations. Lost work may be as a result of browser crashing, losing network connectivity, server going down etc.  Depending on the state of the edited integration, the loss of the work can range from minimal changes to complicated mappings and transformations between applications.  This blog describes how the integration developer can recover the lost changes.

What is recovered?

• Changes made by the integration developer after fully completing an action. For Example,

  • If the developer is adding an Invoke action, it is considered complete only after the developer completes the configuration and clicks the Done button on the Summary page and returns to the canvas.

  • If the developer is adding a Logger action, it is considered complete only after the developer clicks the Close button on the Configure Logger page and returns to the canvas.

  • If the developer is performing a delete of an action, it is considered complete only after the developer clicks the Delete button, confirms the delete action and returns to the canvas.

• Changes made in the Mapping editor after the developer clicks on Validate

  • If the developer performed a few mappings and clicks on Validate, and if a crash occurs, any changes done before clicking on Validate is recovered.

What is not recovered?

• Layout changes made by the integration developer

• Map My Data integration changes

• Changes while configuring an action. For Example,

  • If the developer is configuring a map in the mapping editor and the browser crashes, changes performed before clicking on Validate

  • If the developer is configuring an adapter and a crash occurs before returning to the canvas

• Changes made in Mapping Editor when launched from Assignment variable

Who can recover unsaved changes?

• Only the integration developer who was making the changes can recover the unsaved data.

  • This restriction is in place because, only the developer who was making the changes has the required context whether to recover the unsaved changes or not.

Details

The following section describes in detail how recovery is performed

Assume that an integration developer is editing an integration. The following screenshot shows that the developer has just created a scheduled integration.

Now the user adds an Invoke with a Map and a Note

Let’s assume that the browser crashes or is accidentally closed. When the same user logs back in and navigates to the Integration Assets page, the user will see that the integration that was being edited will display an UNSAVED CHANGES badge and is in a locked state.

It also displays the Edit icon. This is a deviation from the past.  Only the last user editing the integration would see this option.

It also displays Resume Edit option in the menu. This is a deviation from the past.  Only the last user editing the integration would see this option

Now the user decides to click on either the Name or the ‘Resume Edit’ menu option or the Edit icon. This will take them to the integration canvas with integration recovered as show below. User will also see a message “Unsaved changes for integration INTEGRATION1 (1.0) have been recovered and are displayed in the canvas, but not saved yet.”

If the user clicks on close, they get a prompt as shown below to either save or discard the changes as the recovered changes have not been saved.

If the user clicks on Save, the unsaved changes are saved. If the user clicks Discard, changes are lost and they would see as shown below

Since users are already used to clicking on Unlock to re-start editing the integration, if they click on Unlock they would see as follows. They get a message saying that “Integration was locked by you 5 minutes ago. You can edit and recover your changes or you can unlock and discard unsaved changes.”

Clicking on Unlock and Discard, will unlock the integration and discard the unsaved changes and keep the user in the Assets page

Clicking on Edit & Recover will recover the unsaved changes and will take them to the canvas

Instead of the user who was editing the integration if an Administrator logs in,  they will not see the UNSAVED CHANGES badge for the integration.

Administrator will not see the Edit icon either. Only the View and Menu icons are displayed.

Administrator will also not see the Resume Edit option in the menu, rather sees the Edit option.

But if the Administrator clicks on the Unlock option, they would now get a message saying

“Integration was locked by icsdeveloper on Fri, Sep 25th, 2020 04:32:47 PM MDT.
Only icsdeveloper can recover the changes.
Please contact icsdeveloper if you want to recover unsaved changes or select unlock to discard unsaved changes.”

So, the Administrator cannot recover the changes, only Unlock and discard them.

If the crash occurs when the user is in the Mapping editor, they will be able to recover changes up to the point they clicked on Validate button

Additional things to Note

Recovery is also supported under the following conditions.

• When the user logouts intentionally or unintentionally during an edit session.
• When the user keeps an the integration edit session idle and a session timeout happens.
• When a managed server re-start happens.