SAP Integration Suite - Design Guidelines in the integration flow editor of SAP Cloud Integration

[kamlesh_zanje]

Introduction

Design guidelines feature is available in the integration flow editor of SAP Cloud Integration with the 5.59.x/6.51.x to help integration developers to design and develop enterprise-grade integration flows. To know, you can refer the help documentation Design Guidelines | SAP Help Portal and Design Guidelines View | SAP Help Portal.

In this community blog, I will give a short overview on the design guidelines. Let us understand the fundamentals of the design guidelines prior having a deep dive.

What are Design Guidelines?

Integration flow design guidelines enable integration developers to design and develop integration flows, interfaces in a robust fashion to safeguard the company's mission critical business processes.

In the past, these design guidelines were recommendations that were published as product help and prepackaged content on SAP Business Accelerator Hub. You can find the guidelines in the Integration Flow Design Guidelines section. Now, the same guidelines are incorporated within the software as rules that help integration developers for easy consumption.

Why Design Guidelines?

Integration flow design guidelines help to improve the quality of the integration flows, interfaces by keeping them readable, easy to understand, avoid memory leaks, avoid performance overhead and helps handling error in a good way.

Motivation

• Design guidelines helps understand the basic capabilities for modeling integration flows.
• Provides guidelines to implement the basic enterprise integration patterns.
• It helps to improve the performance of integration flows and reduce the possibility of the outages related to OOM, memory consumption etc.
• It applies highest security standards.
• It enables the integration flows ready for the productive usage.

Availability

Design guidelines are available in the SAP Cloud Integration across Standalone NEO, Cloud Foundry, and Integration suite.

Personas

Broadly there are two personas involved in the design guidelines configuration and execution process. Please check their roles and responsibility.

Persona	Responsibility
Tenant administrator/Integration Lead/Solution Architect	Configure the design guideline at the tenant level to make it available for all integration flows. Review the design guidelines compliance report and take a decision for the Go-Live in the production environment.
Integration Developer	Execute the design guideline on the integration flow. Download the compliance report and share with tenant administrator/integration lead for the review.

Workflow

Below diagram depicts the workflow that will benefit you in the usage of the design guidelines. Broadly there are two personas who will be involved in leveraging the benefit of design guidelines.

Tenant administrator, who will enable the design guidelines at the tenant level and integration developer who shall execute the guidelines on the integration flow to improve the quality.

Our recommendation is to impose the below process which will help to improve the quality of the integration flow and ensure the smooth transition for the go live in the production environment.

Let me try to explain the process by taking a following scenario into consideration.

Configure Design Guidelines

Configuring and enabling design guidelines is the responsibility of the Tenant Administrator/Integration Lead/Solution Architect.

We have a dedicated application role for the tenant administrator in NEO and Cloud Foundry. Please refer this documentation Persona | SAP Help Portal

However, tenant administrator can create a custom persona such as solution architect or Integration lead to manage and configure the design guidelines at the tenant level by using the role “WorkspaceDesignGuidelinesConfigure”.

User having a proper authorization will be able to see Design Guidelines tab in the integration settings page of the Integration Suite tenant.  

Before you enable/disable design guidelines, understand every design guideline and its implications. Consume the in-app help available for each design guideline to learn more.

You can enable the design guidelines that you think are appropriate for your organization's requirements. Similarly, disable the ones that you think aren't appropriate anymore.

The design guidelines are logically grouped. For example, all transaction handling related guidelines are grouped under a single category. Some of the logical groupings are Handle errors gracefully and run an integration flow under well-defined boundary conditions.

Severity decides the criticality and importance of the design guidelines.   Severity of the design guidelines is categorized as High, Medium, and Low.

Design guidelines which are switched-on will be applicable to the integration flows for the execution.

It is desirable that you like to follow the same design guidelines in your other development tenants, hence, to ease the work, we have offered export/import feature to export the design guidelines with the enabled/disabled status from one tenant and import the same in another tenant This way, you don't have to manually enable the same design guidelines in multiple tenants.

Execute Design Guidelines

As we discussed, design guidelines are rules that help you design robust integration flows. Your tenant administrators or integration leads would have enabled all or a subset of available design guidelines that they think are appropriate for your organization's business needs.

Integration developer responsibility would be to execute the design guidelines after they have developed the integration flow. You can also run the guidelines on the already developed integration flows as well.

Guidelines which are mandated by the tenant administrator or Integration lead will participate in the execution of the design guidelines on the selected integration flow.

Remember that not all enabled design guidelines are applicable for every integration flow that you create. The integration flow editor intelligently identifies the design guidelines that are applicable and validates the integration flow only against the applicable ones. Applicability – “Not Applicable” means the corresponding guidelines is not applicable to your integration flow.

Compliance status can be either “Compliant” or “Non-Compliant”. If the integration flow is not compliant to the guidelines, then analysis report will be provided which will educate integration developer how to fix the failed guidelines and ensure the quality of your interface. Analysis will also cover the model step where the fix must be applied. Easy navigation to the problematic step of the integration flow is offered to ease the job of the integration developer.

Once the design guidelines are made compliant, our recommendation is to download the report and share with the integration lead/Tenant administrator/Solution Architect so they can review the guidelines report and take a decision for transport of the integration content to the production environment for the Go-Live.

FAQs

• In which product of SAP Cloud Integration, design guidelines feature is available?

Design guidelines is available in Cloud Integration NEO, Cloud Foundry, and Integration Suite all editions.

• Who can configure, enable/disable design guidelines at the tenant level in the integration settings page?

Tenant administrator or the user having the application role – “WorkspaceDesignGuidelinesConfigure”.

• Do the non-compliant design guidelines lead to integration flow deployment failure?

No.

• Do the non-compliant design guidelines lead to content transport failure?

No.

• Can I execute design guidelines on the standard pre-packaged integration content?

Yes, you can execute design guidelines on standard and custom integration content.

• Can I execute design guidelines on the read-only Integration flow?

Yes.

• Who can execute design guidelines on the integration flow?

Integration developer can execute the guidelines on the integration flow.

• Do the support users are allowed to download design guidelines compliance report?

No, they cannot download the report. However, they can visualize the guidelines compliance result in the integration flow editor.

• Can I know when the last time the design guidelines was executed on the integration flow?

Yes, we show the datetime information in the design guidelines tab of the integration flow after the guidelines are executed.

• Can I know on which version of integration flow the design guidelines was executed?

Yes, we show the integration flow version in the design guidelines tab of the integration flow.

• Can integration developer remove the design guidelines which are mandated by the tenant administrator?

No, guidelines which are mandated cannot be removed by the integration developer from the execution.

• In which format I can download the design guidelines compliance report

Report is available in the xls format.

What’s coming next?

We have the following increments planned in the succession.

1. Increase the coverage by adding more design guidelines for the integration flow.
2. Skip design guidelines – If the design guidelines fail (i.e., non-compliant), we want to offer a feature for the integration developer to skip the failed design guidelines with his/her consent mainly to block the false positive guidelines failure.
3. Public Remote APIs for enabling CI/CD requirements.
4. Restrict deployment and transport of the integration flow but via a proper governance and transparency.
5. Enable design guidelines in the Script Collection, Message Mapping, and other applicable artifacts.
6. Custom design guidelines for the customers to write their own custom rules.

I am also planning to write a developer tutorial with an example. Stay tuned !

Hope you will get benefited with this feature. Please experience the feature and provide your valuable feedback.