Testing SAP Pipeline Concept flows with Figaf

[DG]

Intro

The Pipeline Concept mimics SAP PI/PO integration processing in a native Cloud Integration way. You can see the original post 

It is a complex setup, but once you run it, you can simplify several steps in your integration. You don't need to worry about error handling and retrying in each integration. 

I have been discussing the concept with Alexander Bundschuh and ideas for improving it. It sounds like there are some nice roadmap items for making it better and supporting more use cases. 

When I talk with customers about migration, I always recommend they check the Pipeline concept because it will make their migration journey much easier for the Async scenarios. I hope you will check it out also. 

Tooling

The Pipeline concept is excellent. 

There are APIs that you can use to create entries in the Partner Directory. It is a bit manual, but you can maintain it. 

It is possible to explore the setup. I do think you need a better framework around it. 

Over the last three months, we have invested quite a bit in the framework to make it easier for users to use for migration, testing and operation. 

I did host a video about the concept and the tooling earlier.

Migration

The migration journey is essential. In Figaf, you select the ICO you want to migrate and then create all the required flows and objects. 

• Inbound flows if you have special adapters
• Converflows if you have modules or File Content Conversion in the Sender side
• Outbound flows will all the required mappings and communication channels
• All Partner Directory entries needed, including the XSLTs

Testing

You should not explore anything if you don't have a way to test it. It was not ideal, and we did see a need to improve it. 

With Figaf, we offer a one-year license to enable customers to test the migration from SAP PI/PO to Integration Suite. This will allow you to take messages from your existing SAP PI/PO system, which can be done fairly quickly, and then migrate them to different flows. This also works for the Pipeline messages. 

Once you have some messages from your PI system for an ICO you can easily transform them to work with the Pipeline messages with our new Chain object. Here you can map the different messages and where it should be able to fetch the resulting messages. 

Here is an example of where the test cases cover two flows that need to be checked to see if messages should be sent to them. 

Once you run the test case, you can see that the relevant messages have been found and used for comparison. 

With the new testMode option from Pipeline release 1.0.5 there could be new options to not send message to target systems. We need to figure out how it will work with our testing tool. 

Partner Directory

One big part of the Pipeline Concept is the Partner Directory. We have added a UI that enables you to view, edit, and test XSLTs. 

Now, you can also select these entries and transport them. That makes it much easier to maintain the flows. 

Migration Edition

You can explore this in the Free Migration Edition of the Figaf tool, which offers a two-month trial of all its components.

The testing part will allow you to test the migrated iflows for up 1 year.