PI/XI: how to preserve values from communication channels during importing?

[MichalKrawczyk]

As we all know some of the communication channel parameters get overwritten
during the import procedure. This is actually good as we don't want to
have an activated channel on production that would pick up the files from DEV/TEST
environment and as those values get overwritten you cannot activate the channel
so it's safe until you manually put correct values inside it. But there are times
when preserving those channel parameters might be useful and it can safe a lot of time
like migrations to a new environment or different sorts of recoveries.

Attention:

There is no standard SAP supported way of doing this so please keep in mind
that the way proposed in this blog is not SAP recommended - it's just a workaround.

Let's take an example and try to preserve value of the Source Directory of the file adapter
as in standard during the importing procedure it would get replaced with a default value -> '/'.


1. When we open Enteprise Services Repository you can find SAP BASIS SWCV
and underneath namespace - http://sap.com/xi/XI/System

2. Open this namespace and go to adapter metadata.

3. Open file adapter metadata and go to the change mode (you need to make your SWCV - SAP BASIS
editable first)

4. Search for file.sourceDir attribute and it should look like the one in the Figure below:



5. As you can see there is a field - Flag with nonTransportable option checked

6. Remove this flag so it will look like in the Figure below:



7. Save and activate.

7. Now you can export and import the communication channel and you will see that
for all file channels field sourceDir (availabe in the sender File adapter) was
the same as before the import - so it was not changed.

8. You can do it for all other fields which have the nonTransportable flag option.


Important


1. This procedure does not work for password fields.

2. This procedure is not SAP recommended - use it at your own risk.


Credits

I'd like to thank Mariusz Marczak for this excellent idea.