HANA Cloud Integration (HCI) - Application Edition Learning Series - Part 4

[AbinashNanda]

Introduction

In this blog we will look at the HCI content catalogue and web based tooling.

Content Catalog

The HCI contents are delivered using a web based catalogue also called HCI space. There is a public catalogue available at https://cloudintegration.hana.ondemand.com/#shell/catalog. Here we can view all the pre-delivered content provided by SAP

Every Customer will have its own tenant specific catalogue which can be accessed via the url https://<operation server>/itspaces. The tenant catalogue will have the pre delivered content loaded as shown below, each package for a specific type of integration.

Each Package contains a set of artefacts Integration Flows (process integration), Value mapping and URL.

Tooling

The web ui based tooling is alternative to eclipse based tooling which allows deploying and monitoring integration projects from browser. The advantage is it does not need any local installation like that of eclipse. Another advantage of web based tooling is, unlike eclipse based tooling, does not need any plugin updates as the features in web based tooling are automatically updated by the platform with every release.

We recommend to use web based tooling instead of eclipse based tooling as going forward all new features and enhancements will be delivered via this, one example UI based Value mapping maintenance can only done via the web based tooling in a future release

Configure and Deploy

To deploy and monitor content via web ui the role AuthGroup.IntegrationDeveloper, is required for the specific tenant.

To deploy an artifact from the HCI space, we can use the action button->deploy as shown below

Now we need to adapt all parameters as per our environment and deploy the iFlow

Note: Additionally certificates needs to be adapted, in case of Certificate based client authentication (from Sender system)

Once the artifact is deployed successfully we can see it under the My Projects tab and next time onwards we can make changes to the iFlow configuration and deploy it from this tab itself.

Mapping Editor

From HCI space we can also do mapping changes in a very limited capacity as of now. As of release 2014-05 we can do 1:1 mapping and delete existing mapping with the web based mapping editor.

Note: For advanced mapping features for example to use standard functions supported by mapping runtime we still need to use eclipse as of now. But in a future release this would be also available via web editor.

To open mapping editor we simply need to click on the mapping for an iFlow project

And then click on Edit button in the bottom left corner of the editor.

Monitoring

Using Monitoring tab we can check the runtime status for all the deployed artifacts as well as Messages.

For example we can see the status of the iFlow project (artifact) we deployed above

Similarly we can see the Message processing status

And we can navigate to the message processing log of individual messages by clicking on the status as shown below

Note: Some additional monitoring functions such as Tail Log view are only available in eclipse as of now.

In the next blog we will look at the Security concepts and how it is handled in HCI. Watch out for this space and happy learning!!!