Interview with Thomas Kurian - Oracle’s acquisition of BEA Systems

Finally, Oracle’s B2B engine provides a way to hook up your SOA, not just within your company but outside the organization, and Oracle Enterprise Manager becomes the management framework. If you want to read more..

http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/08-sep/o58interview.html

Internal Properties in Oracle B2B

For every EDI document Processing in B2B, there is a need to configure the Envelope information by using Document Protocol parameters in B2B. This information is used by XEngine,

1. To create the envelope for the document sent by Back end application. Xengine create the envelope (Interchange and Group) ,embed the Transaction set and send it to Trading partner.

2. To identify the Incoming Document Type and revision, there by identifying the business action for Agreement Identification.


What is Internal Properties

For every XML schema generated per ecs file while modeling the document in B2B Document editor, it defines Internal Properties. Internal Properties are used to

1. Send the Envelope information to the back end application in case of Inbound flow. By default, XEngine strip off the Envelope information and send only the Transaction set to back end appliction.

2. Override the Document Protocol parameter which is defined in B2B, which is used by B2B to create the envelope.

set oracle.tip.adapter.b2b.edi.FAInternalProperties=true

in tip.properties to avail this feature.

B2B Generates FA/Control messages

Consider the case of B2B generating the Acknowledgment, by default B2B always uses Document protocol parameters to generate the envelope for sending FA/Control. By setting the

oracle.tip.adapter.b2b.edi.FAInternalProperties=true in tip.properties

it is possible to make use of the envelope details of the inbound business document while generating the FA/Control.

Oracle B2B Booth in OOW-2008

There are interesting Retail and Health care use cases are getting demoed in B2B Booth. Do visit...

Sync Response

This feature introduces a Synchronous response to any of the incoming Business Document. Sync HTTP response essentially mean, sending the response using the same http connection as the incoming business message.


There is an introduction of a new URI b2b/SYNCResponseServlet to handle the Sync response in B2B. Every business message which is received in this URI, it is expected to send the response using the same http connection with in the time out time. The time out time is configured in tip.properties using

oracle.tip.adapter.b2b.httpSyncReplyWaitTime=

Use case : Globalchips to receive 270 EDI request from Acme over HTTP and respond with 271 EDI synchronously.

Implementation :

1. Acme Side

a. For both Acme and Globalchips, supported business action(270,271) must have

Functional Acknowledgement required? should be set to NO.

b. Configure the following in the additional transport header for GlobalChips.

http.sync=true#timeout=300000

c. End point URI for GlobalChips is selected as b2b/SYNCResponseServlet

2. Global Chips side.

a. For both Acme and Globalchips, supported business action(270,271) must have

Functional Acknowledgement required? should be set to NO.

b. web.xml in $ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/OC4j_B2B/applications/b2b/ip/WEB-INF/ must be modified to include the following servlet-mapping for transportServlet.

<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>transportServlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>SYNCResponseServlet</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

c. Configure the following tip.properties

oracle.tip.adapter.b2b.httpSyncReplyWaitTime = wait time in minutes.

d. Also set

oracle.tip.adapter.b2b.ReplyToAsRequest=true

Back end application such as BPEL is required to send the response i.e 271 with replyToMsgID value of the original message. B2B message ID of the request message 270 should be sent as replyToMsgID of the Synchronous response 271

Please note in Oracle 10g, this feature is not High availability enabled i.e it is not possible to get the request in one instance of B2B and send the Sync Response in another.

Interesting Macros in EDI and HL7

Macros play an important role in XEngine, when there is an use case to fill this data in the B2B Layer, instead of sending it from the Back end application.

1. controlNumber.

In case of Outbound Messages, B2B Generates the control number only in case the Back end application send the EDI message with the Keyword #controlNumber for e.g.

#ControlNumber#

Oracle AS B2B fills in the unique number for Interchange and Transaction set Control Number and uses it for correlating the incoming Control messages.

2. SegmentCount

Segment count for the current EDI Document. Xengine will replace with the approprite values. e.g #SegmentCount#

3. MessageSendingFacility

MSH Position 4.1 e.g #Property(MessageSendingFacility)#

4. MessageSendingApp

MSH Position 3.1 e.g #Property(MessageSendingApp)#

5. MessageReceivingApp

MSH Position 5.1 e.g #Property(MessageReceivingApp)

6. MessageReceivingFacility

MSH Position 6.1 e.g #Property(MessageReceivingFacility)#

How to enable b2b_idc_transport.log

The below two tip.properties used to control the transport logs,

For External Delivery Channel :
oracle.tip.adapter.b2b.transportTraceLogLevel

For Internal Delivery Channel :
oracle.tip.adapter.b2b.appTransportTraceLogLevel

The possible values could be,
WARNING | STATUS | DEBUG | ERROR

For backward compatibility, we have made assumption that if old properties
are defined, logLevel will be assumed to be DEBUG

The new Properties for Transport Logger overrides old properties.

If none of the properties (old and new) for Transport Logger is specified,
default log level is ERROR

The new transport log files will be created in the same directory in which
b2b log file is created.
Example: $ORACLE_HOME/ip/log/b2b

For Internal delivery channel b2b_idc_transport.log

For External delivery channel b2b_dc_transport.log