New Pipeline Concept features: Supporting service interface operations and others

[alex_bundschuh]

With the latest version 1.0.10 of the Pipeline Concept, we have shipped the following features:

• Supporting service interface operations
• Updated the allowed header list
• Have done script optimizations
• Converted the XI message ID to upper case

The package can be accessed from the SAP Business Accelerator Hub. If you have already copied the package to your workspace in your SAP Integration Suite tenant, you can simply run the update of the package to be able to use the latest features.

With respect to the allowed header list, we did some minor changes to increase the flexibility when using SAP headers starting with the terms SAP_Sender and SAP_Receiver as well as custom headers starting with the term customX. So, now any header starting with those terms are allowed.

Script optimizations have been carried out for the scripts in the provided script collection. Here, we used the new features to fix script incompatibilities and optimizing Groovy scripts via generative AI. Actually, not much had to be changed, the scripts are actually not that complex and in most cases already most efficiently coded.

With respect to the XI message ID, we received feedback from a customer that it was hard to track an XI message from the sending system in the message monitor of the Cloud Integration. The issue was that the ID in the Integration Engine monitor was all capital letter whereas in the Cloud Integration message monitor it was lower case. So, copy and past into the search field was not really supported. In the generic XI inbound processing flow Pipeline Generic Step01 - Inbound Processing for XI we now simply convert the XI message IDs to upper case to be compatible with the format which is displayed in the message monitoring of the Integration Engine of the sender system.

Finally, we now support integration scenarios with multiple operations of the sender service interface, see Scenarios with Sender Service Interface Operations. For this, you need to pass the SAP header SAP_SenderOperation from either the scenario-specific inbound processing flow or the scenario-specific inbound conversion flow to the generic integration flows to be able to determine receiving systems or receiver interfaces based on the operation. In the XSLT to determine receivers and receiver interfaces you can then refer to the SAP header as parameter, see example below.

You can either implement your own logic to determine the operation or you can reuse the templates provided in the integration package for scenario-specific inbound processing or scenario-specific inbound conversion where we have implemented the following logic:

We assume that there is a one-to-one relationship between the service interface operation and the message type, i.e., each operation of one and the same service interface must have a unique message type. This is exactly the same restriction that we have in SAP Process Orchestration which allows us to uniquely determine the operation based on the message type.

For this, we need to maintain the mapping between the operation and the root node name of the incoming XML message. Optionally, if the incoming message is not in XML format, you can maintain the mapping in the scenario-specific inbound conversion flow assuming that after the conversion your message is in XML format.

In a content modifier step, for each operation you need to create an exchange property to map the operation to the message type adhering to the naming convention as shown in the figure below.

In the example, we map the operation Create to the message type MTOrderCreate and the operation Change to the message type MTOrderChange. In addition, we need to store the name of the XML root node in the exchange property messageTypeFromXMLRoot via the xpath /*/local-name().

After the content modifier, we need to carry out the Groovy script mapMessageTypeToOperation. The script compares the value of all exchange properties having the prefix SAP-MT2OP- with the value of the exchange property messageTypeFromXMLRoot to determine the operation. This operation will then at the end be stored in the header SAP_SenderOperation.

If you like to try out the pipeline concept in general and the new features in particular, check out this github repository where we describe how to setup sample scenarios using the pipeline concept. Here, we have added a new scenario Scenario 10 leveraging the new service interface operation feature.

If you have feedback, feel free to reach out to me or add your comment here.