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.