SAP TechEd & d-code this year in Berlin has shown great momentum around integration and orchestration topics, especially around our strategic cloud integration solution – SAP HANA Cloud Integration (SAP HCI).
While the SAP HCI product portfolio was just recently complemented by a Standard and Professional Edition which serve as a general-purpose platform for any-to-any-integration - let’s still have a closer look in this blog at the latest enhancements with respect to the Application Edition of the product (sold and used in conjunction with a pre-packaged SAP cloud application).
When talking about the Application Edition at SAP TechEd & d-code you’ve often heard buzzwords like ‘out-of-the box’ or ‘ready-to-use’ consumption of pre-packaged integration content that can be found at https://cloudintegration.hana.ondemand.com/. While the HCI reference content is publicly available at this URL the actual consumption step takes place in the customer’s web tenant which gets provisioned by SAP for every licensed SAP HCI customer.
Let me explain to you what’s under the hoods and how pre-packaged reference in the HCI Web tooling can consumed following two alternative routes:
- Fast Track Consumption: integration artifacts can be consumed ‘as-is’ by the customers in a fast track scenario with only basic system and authentication information required to be added
- Modeling Enhancements: flexibly enhanced integration artifacts as per the customer’s needs by adding further flow steps with the help of the newly offered Web modeling functionality
1. Fast Track Consumption
In case you’ll find that the standard reference content fits quite nicely your integration needs: just select the ‘Configure’ action for an integration flow artifact directly in the catalog section:
Picture 1: Fast Track Consumption of Standard Reference Content
What you now need to do is adjust the system information (endpoints) and authentication that is specific to your customer environment and deploy the integration flow to runtime. That’s it!
Picture 2: Fast Track Consumption - Adjusting your Sender System Information
(*Note: currently it is still a pre-requisite to do deply the credentials and security artifacts via the Node Explorer of the HCI Eclipse tooling. It’s on our product roadmap to also bring this feature to Web)
2. Modeling Enhancements with the help of the Web Modeling Palette
In case your analysis has shown that you need to add further integration logic to the standard content you can now also do that in the web tooling with the help of the modeling palette.
You need to follow these steps:
First copy the reference package in question from the content catalog to your design time (Customer Workspace).
Picture 3: Copying Reference Content to the customer workspace (Design Time)
Then drill down to the integration flow you want to modify and switch to edit mode. You will see the modeling palette appears on the left of the canvas and offers you a variety of pre-defined integration steps and adapters that you can flexibly add to your integration flow according to your integration needs. Nice thing about the new HCI architecture here is that you can sequence the process steps in a quite flexible manner (e.g. mapping before or/and after a routing step).
Here come three examples of flow steps that you might typically want to add:
Security steps
Security is a number one interest of the customer in the cloud environment and SAP Hana Cloud Integration offers a variety of data protection mechanisms (runtime isolation between tenants, data base isolation at schema level, role based access control)
When it comes to the message payload level you can e.g. add encrypting and decrypting steps (like a PGP encryptor)
Picture 4: Adding of a security step to an integration flow
Message Transformation Steps, including Mappings
Message Mapping is the heart and core object of almost every integration artifact. With the help of the modeling functionality you can also add one or more mapping steps to an integration flow. If you want to have a deeper look at the mapping options in the Web tooling I would like to recommend gayathri.narayana’s recent blog Mapping Overview in SAP Hana Cloud Integration.
Picture 5: Adding of a mapping step to an integration flow
Polling Data from External System
A new addition to the HCI product is the ability to poll data intermittently from an external system. In the current set of reference content you see this feature mostly used in SuccessFactors integration scenarios. To model an additional polling step do the following:
Step 1) Add a request/reply step to your integration flow
Step 2) Add a new Receiver participant
Step 3) Connect the two shapes by selecting an adapter of type SuccessFactors from the modeling palette
Now enter the required data (e.g for the SuccessFactors adapter information like entity to be polled, scheduling interval, system information, etc.).
Picture 5: Adding of an external call to an integration flow
Once done with your changes you would simply follow the same next step as for the Fast Track Consumption and now deploy the integration flow to your runtime.
All integration flows that are running on your tenant (be it directly deployed from catalog via fast track consumption or deployed via the Web Design Time) can finally be viewed and monitored in the ‘Run’ and ‘Monitor’ sections of the application.
In one of our next product increments customers will also get the options to build integration flows from scratch in the Web tooling – Stay tuned!
Useful links:
Get started with SAP HANA Cloud Integration
SAP HANA Cloud Integration - Test and learn more about SAP’s cloud based integration solution
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