Application integration
with Oracle E-Business Suite
Introduction
Enterprise Application Integration is the need to share data and business processes between applications used by the enterprise. The applications can be internal of external of the enterprise.
The purpose of this article is to enumerate some different integration approaches to use with Oracle E-Business Suite products and technologies. I will also present the integration using Web Services that we use for one of our client.
The different integration products and technologies with Oracle E-Business Suite
1- Oracle Web ADI
We use Web ADI a lot to load HR related data into Oracle HRMS. The data were entered into Excel files and loaded into Oracle HRMS using Web ADI.
2- Open Interface Table and concurrent programs
Oracle provides interfaces tables and concurrent programs to import data into Oracle EBS. Concurrent programs are used to apply proper validations and transfer the data into Oracle EBS through the use of Oracle API.
3- Business events using Oracle Workflow
You can start a process based of the occurrence of a business process. Event subscription specifies the actions to execute.
4- Web Services
We use this approach to enable integration between an external system that contains timesheets information and Oracle Time and Labor.
The external system use a non-Oracle database and a database link between the two systems was not possible for technical reasons.
I used the Oracle Service Invocation Framework (SIF) to invoke a third-party Web Service to get the data from the external system.
SIF is a component of Integrated SOA Gateway.
Integrated SOA Gateway is a responsibility in Oracle E-Business Suite that give you access to a complete set of pre-built reusable business services.
The following diagram is an example of an integration between a work schedule system and Oracle Time and Labor (OTL):
Steps of the diagram
The following will explain the steps enumerated in the diagram:
- 1- User login E-Business Suite (EBS) and take a responsibility.
- 2- The user executes the concurrent program (Run Request screen) that will execute the workflow.
- 3- The workflow executes the following activities: Set the Soap message, Invoke the web service, Receive the response from the web service
- 4- The web service calls a servlet that act as an ETL to get the working schedule hours from the source system.
- 5- The servlet insert the data into a custom staging table in E-Business Suite (EBS).
- 6- The web service sends a response to the workflow (success or error).
- 7- The workflow reads the schedules hours and execute validation and calculation activities.
- 8- The timesheets are created in Oracle Time and Labour using the API HXC_TIMESTORE_DEPOSIT.
Oracle Workflow versus Oracle SOA Suite (BPEL)
One of the important decision I had to make is to use Oracle Workflow or BPEL to support the workflow process management.
- I decided to use Oracle Workflow because the interaction is synchronous with callback and not asynchronous.
- No use of XPath or XQuery data manipulation steps
- No advanced notification such as SMS, voice was required.
The important steps of the workflow
Set the Soap message: Must be tested independently using soapUI before implementation into Oracle Worlflow as an activity.
Invoke the web service: Use the Service Invocation Framework (SIF) to invoke web service using the WSDL instead of using complex Soap API. We raise an event with a business event subscription that call the web service.
The following picture show the choice to make:
The following picture is the activity of the workflow that raise the event to call the web service:
We have to specify the WSDL of the web service to invoke in the subscription.
Receive the response from the web service: We have an activity in the workflow with an event action of Receive.
Conclusion
This article showed that they are many integration ways and Oracle products that we can use in our integration projects. Service Integration Framework (SIF) can be used to leverage Oracle Workflow and allows developers to invoke web service using WSDL instead of complex Soap API.
