Starting with Hana Cloud Integration? Keep this in mind!

[BobvanR]

A couple of months ago I started to work with Hana Cloud Integration. I followed the SAP e-learning OHAC10 (Hana Cloud Integration), attended a HCI developers day and viewed some webinars. When trying to learn all the possibilities of HCI I encountered some ‘problems’. With this first blog I hope I can  help you get a fresh start with HCI.

• Check out the SAP ‘Starting with HCI’ page. It contains a lot of useful information about the technique, blogs, webinars and other events.

• You can enter a trial program, to see what HCI can do. Check the details here!

• Download Eclipse. This program will help you to develop adapters and integration Flows. To avoid weird errors, make sure you download the Kepler version. This is the version SAP supports.
  Eclipse is used for more than HCI only, therefor you need to download some additional plug-ins. See this page for more information about installing plug-ins in Eclipse.

• So you got your (trial) HCI account, and you got the Eclipse with all the plug-ins, what’s next? You need to set up your Eclipse with your HCI tenant.

Enter your credentials in Eclipse. You should either received an email containing the URL, or use the trial environment.

• Your Eclipse is now linked to your HCI (trial) account. You created a simple iFlow and try to deploy this: error! Before you can start using your HCI tenant you need to create a keystore. (In the trial version, this is already performed by SAP)

        In the PDF 'Create a keystore.pdf', which you can download here, the creating of a new keystore is explained.

• Now that your iFlow can be deployed on your HCI tenant, you want create an iFlow. In my next blog I will show how to call a web service, transform some data and send it via email. If you want to call a web service, or SuccessFactors for example, you need to add certificates to your keystore

        In the ‘Creating a JAVA Keystore.pdf’ there’s this chapter called ‘Importing Signed certification into keystore’. But how do you get your    

        SuccessFactors certificate?

Use Firefox or Chrome and browse to your SuccessFactors login page. Click on the lock, and go to the ‘Connection’ tab. Choose ‘Certificate information’.

Choose Details and go for ‘Copy to file’.

Take the Base64-encoded X.509 (*.CER) and save it.

And there you got your SuccessFactors certificate which you can import in your keystore. This works the same for other certificates.

• So now you are able to create your iFlow, reach to different applications and deploy it to your tenant. But the iFlow is not working and you want to trace the header and the body of your message. For this, you have to make a request to SAP and ask for tracing rights.
  You create a ticket here, and put your request in category LOD-HCI. Make sure you provide all the needed information (like tenant name and S-user).

        After you have been granted the rights, you need to enable tracing in your iFlow.

In the properties of your iFlow, go to Trace Configurations and choose the trace level you want.

In the message monitoring (double click on your tenant, in the node explorer, to get here) select the iFlow you deployed after setting the trace settings and choose for ‘View Trace’. Your iFlow will now be decorated with the selected trace level.

I hope that after reading this blog you are able to set up your HCI tenant with your Eclipse. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me, or leave a comment below.

Bob van Rooij

Blog 1: Starting with Hana Cloud Integration? Keep this in mind!
Blog 2: Starting with Hana Cloud Integration? Create a simple integration flow (iFlow)!

Blog 3: Deep dive in Hana Cloud Integration

Blog 4: Hana Cloud Integration and SuccessFactors Integration Center

Blog 5: Hana Cloud Integration in comparison to Dell’s Boomi.