“If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.”

The title of this blog is actually a quote from H.G. Wells. He was a great writer and amongst others he wrote several science fiction novels. The main theme in his books was always about humans and their society. We all organize ourselves into various kinds of social groupings and one my groupings is the community of SAP Process Integration.

Today I was working on a PI mapping and could not understand why it was failing at first. Finally I figured it out, the standard PI mapping functions were giving me results which I did not expect. When I looked at it closer I thought: “if I would have done it, I would have implemented this functionality differently”. Then again, it works as designed.

Still I could not let it go and opened Eclipse and started to code a function which did the job better (better in a sense of getting the expected result that I needed). I compiled the class and added the jar file to the mapping. (As there was already a JAVA class attached to the mapping with other functions.)

Then I came across a blog post from Daniel Graversen about isNill and isNull. ( See blog http://scn.sap.com/community/pi-and-soa-middleware/blog/2013/02/05/null-in-the-sap-pi-mapping-context-queue) He had done the same thing; he fell down and stood up!

To get back to the main theme of H.G. Wells where people tend to organize themselves in social groupings, I thought why not ask my grouping/community if they experience the same thing and want to stand up today. I send some tweets out  towards fellow developers and an exciting idea cam up: why not start a PI codeXchange?

In this PI codeXchange we bundle our own functions into several classes and together with the community we build our own classes. Think of functions regarding dates, string and queue handling amongst others. An example of a date function could be to ad or subtract days from  a starting date and so on. We think this could really serve the community.

Most people are wondering, nice idea and what’s in it for me? Besides the intellectual challenge, we help the community. You will again knowledge on how fellow developers are solving their problems and you will expose yourself to the community, which is good for you network.

So now I am asking to everyone who fell down and wants to stand up today, please participate. Let us hear your voice and tell us what you think of this idea to start our own community library for SAP PI functions.

Again, please share your thoughts and ideas about this.