The book’s authors presented a brief session on the best practices at a packed Oracle Partner event. The following presentation – shows the material that was presented.
Some of these points are expressed in the book already, others are our Definitive Tips and Guides posts.
Good development practises such as configuration management and naming conventions have been a topic of conversation a number of times recently for us when it comes to ICS. In this post we will look at what configuration management means to ICS and the application of naming standards.
So why do we need configuration management with a tool such as ICS? The question depends on what stage of the software lifecycle you are, but a few reasons:
In ICS Definitive Guide #2 we looked at the scheduling of integrations and mentioned the possibility of using iCal. In this tip we shall explore advanced iCal facility for defining schedules within ICS.
The iCal format is probably best known for sharing meeting events in tools such as outlook. The format is actually a standard defined by the IETF originally in 1998 (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt) and updated several times the latest being 
2015 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7529). The goal of the definition has been for the purpose of driving standardisation across PIM tools (Personal Information Management) tools which includes Outlook and Thunderbird etc. It is a substantial standard the original document ran to 150 pages, but the section supported by the schweduler’s advanced option purely relates to the reoccurence definition covered by section 4.3.10 of the original RFC, and only takes five pages. If you want to know lots about iCal and the varying revisions then you may find https://icalendar.org/ helpful.
It is worth mentioning that today ICS under the hood exploits Oracle’s Enterprise Scheduler Service (ESS). ESS documentation identifies that it works to the 2445 version of the specification (see here). ESS became a 1st class citizen component with the start of the 12c middleware product stack. As a result, if you see any errors processing an iCal configuration the error codes will reference ESS does.
In this Definitive Tip, we are going to look at the ability to use Versioning on Integrations to seamlessly deploy update integrations is an important requirement of any enterprise integration platform.
ICS supports the model of semantic versioning, perhaps better recognised as versioning as Major, Minor and patch. Which is best described at http://semver.org/.
This post will demo a minor and then a major version change. So we can see how change as the behaviours change between the two. A major change indicates an likely change in definition and minor one reflects logical change.
To demonstrate versioning we need an integration that is currently active. Ideally, you will have some sort of data feed or test framework, such as SoapUI or even a simple cURL script regularly triggering the integration. We need this script running to demonstrate the impact of the cutover.
Definitive Tips, like our Definitive Guide posts address features could not be incorporated into the book, either simply because the feature is new or simply down to the fact the new feature arrived since the book has been published. Unlike the Definitive Guide entries, the tips will always remain very short. The first tip will address content filters in the designer.
Designer Content Filters
Release 16.4.5 introduced a new filter feature to help improve the location of Integrations, Connections and other designer elements. If you visit the Integrations parts of the designer for example, you will now see additional options included in the banner as highlighted in the following screenshot:
This is the second article in the Definitive Guide series. This time we take a look at the ability to Schedule an Orchestration integration within ICS has arrived with release 16.4.5 release of ICS, To demonstrate this, we are going to reuse our FlightSitRep endpoint from the book’s Chapter 3. If you have not got the book yet – it’s a WSDL one way integration that is connected to Mockable.io.
From the Integrations screen we need to click on the New Integration button, and select the Orchestration pattern in the pop-up dialogue. The first thing we will see when creating an integration is the Create New Integration dialog, as shown here:
As you can see the dialog has a new toggle option which defaults to represent the common approach to Orchestration, that being event triggered through an event or object defined by a connection.
This is the first blog in our ICS Definitive Guide series. In this series we pick one feature that ICS offers and write the most detailed guide on it. This blog introduces the capability of processing batches using the For Each activity in orchestration type integrations.
These blogs follow the same writing style as the book. We sometimes use the same resources as we used in the book, which can be downloaded from the website of Packt. For this blog we are using the same WSDL as we used in chapter 5, Going Social with Twitter and Google, and as in chapter 10, Advanced orchestration with branching and asynchronous flows, but with a little change to one element.
The integration we are going to build simulates a notification send from our Airport Flight Schedules system with a list of persons that are missing / late for their flight. For each flight a list of persons are included in the notification. For each missing person a task is added to a Trello Board, used by the ground personal, to remove the passengers luggage from airplane.
Within the Oracle iPaaS products you will encounter features that exist to help provide security or mitigate the risks of someone misusing Oracle cloud accidentally (or otherwise). These features look to mitigate security issues such as a Denial of Service (DoS) attack (e.g. flooding a web service with more calls than it can handle preventing genuine service calls for being serviced).
We thought it might be useful to pull some articles together that engage and talk about the challenges that can exist:
Last updated: July 28, 2017 at 20:19 pm
We have consolidated all the 3rd Party referencers we know of regarding ICS into this single page.
As we encounter new information we will update the details, and if you encounter useful information missing from this list, please let us know (tweet @ImplementingICS with #ICS)
| Resource | Description - Link |
|---|---|
| Adapter Certification | Oracle Adapter Certification Matrix |
| ICS Cloud Documentation Home | ICS Cloud Latest Edition Documentation |
| Oracle Online Learning | OLL - YouTube ICS Training Playlist |
| Eloqua ICS Connectivity (Eloqua Help Center) | Eloqua Cloud Herlp Centre |
| All A-Team ICS Posts | http://www.ateam-oracle.com/category/cloud/paas/paas-ics/ |
| Oracle Integration Blog | Blog covering all Oracle's Integration offerings |
| Tool | Link |
|---|---|
| Online WSDL pretty print/viewer | https://www.wsdl-analyzer.com/online-wsdl-viewer |
| Web Services Directory | http://www.webservicex.net/New/ |
| Apiary (Swagger / Open API & API Blueprint designer) | https://apiary.io/ |
| Mockable - Endpoint Mocking | https://www.mockable.io/ |
We have seen the question a number of times (such as here) regarding whether or not the ICS Connection agent or (Execurtion) Worker Agent can run on Windows. Presently when establishing an agent ICS provides a Bash shell executable (BSX) file.
We’ve not heard any suggestion this is likely to change – but when you consider that the Agent is essentially a WebLogic server with parts of ICS incorporated into it. You can see that from a production perspective, demand for Windows support isn’t going to be huge.
That said, when researching, testing, developing and testing a lot of people do use a Windows platform. So being able to use the agent is attractive. So what options are available for a Windows environment?
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