Making Effective Connections in OIC
OIC is a very effective integration platform launched by
Oracle in cloud world. The integration platform comes up with many good
features like pre built integrations between standard applications for standard
flows, use of machine learning to recommend the mappings, use of connections as
reusable artefacts in interfaces. it can be used for building integrations
between cloud and on premise applications also.
In this blog, I will touch base on what are connections and what
features Oracle should add to make the connections more effective in OIC.
What are Connections
An application landscape will involve multiple applications
present in an enterprise used for implementing business process. In order to
effectively implement the business process, these applications (COTS products
or custom applications developed) needs to be integrated. Generally multiple
integration touch points exist for an application with different applications
in the landscape.
The integration technology needs to have details about each
Source and target application, to be used by integrations.
This is achieved in OIC by making use of connections. Connections
define information about the instances of each configuration you are
integrating. Oracle Integration includes a set of predefined adapters,
which are the types of applications on which you can base your connections.
These connections are reused by all the interfaces developed
in OIC for that specific application like Oracle ERP cloud, or Oracle HCM
cloud.
Thus this reusable component is a very effective feature.
How connections can be made more Effective
As of now the connections needs to configured using static
data. There is no provision in the connections to populate the attributes/properties
of connections dynamically
For example, one cannot pass release date-time of extract
dynamically to a HCM adapter for doing bulk extracts.
For overcoming such scenarios, Oracle integration cloud
connections need to have a facility to populated the attributes/properties of a
connection from database table like resource bundle is used to populate the UI
labels in a website.
This feature will help in many ways
1)
As all the connection properties are populated
from DB table, when the code is migrated from one environment to another, the
connections are configured as soon as code migration is done. integration team
can have a table in each environment with information about connections that is
specific to that environments. This will make migration process simpler.
2)
If any value of any property in connection to be
changed, then the change can be made in DB table and there won’t be any need to
modify the connection in OIC console.
3)
For any such properties like release date-time
of extract in a HCM adapter for doing bulk extracts, which needs to be passed
dynamically. The value can be updated in The DB table at the end of every run
so that next run can pick up the data accordingly.
