What’s new in SAP Process Orchestration – Q1/2014 (7.31 SP10&11 / 7.4 SP05&06)

Since our last blog in December 2013 (What’s new in Process Orchestration 7.31 SP09/7.4 SP04) we delivered some existing new stuff in SAP Process Orchestration.

This blog describes all the new features and enhancements in SAP Process Orchestration 7.31 SP10&11 / 7.4 SP05&06. After reading this blog you for sure want to upgrade to this latest SPs to leverage all new enhancements.

Process Integration Features

Enhancements in operating and monitoring SAP Process Orchestration

To operate SAP Process Orchestration you will get two new features:

• Tracing for SOAP and HTTP channels

In case of error messages returned by a Web service you can now carry out detailed analysis of HTTP based adapters without the need of external tools. Therefore you enable tracing per receiver channel in module chain via a new parameter – TraceHTTP; supported by three severity levels: headers, plain, hex. Please take also a look at SAP note 1904944.

• Suspend & resume communication channels

In order to carry out operational tasks you can now suspend and resume all communication channels in a controlled manner. Trigger suspend and resume job via SuspendResumeAFWJob, while this state is preserved after restart of the server. If you resume the channels, they will be kept in their original state before you have suspended them and the ones in suspended mode cannot be restarted manually. For more details, please also take a look at the release notes.

Starting with SAP Solution Manager 7.1 SP10 you can now instrument the tooling for message flow monitoring. Targeting the IT&Application Support to enable end-to-end monitoring along integration layers of message exchange, e.g. search for relevant payload data like EDI interchange number or IDoc number and integrate with incident and notification management. Prerequisite for this is the Integration Visibility Core, shipped with SAP Process Orchestration 7.31 SP07 / 7.4 SP02.

Improved runtime behavior of adapter engine

Define the maximum number of receivers per interface and different processing capacity in PI for particular scenarios where the current global setting is not sufficient. Additionally use receiver parallelization in conjunction with message prioritization. Please also take a look at the release notes.

Consuming Web services secured by AGIV security protocol

There is a new PI Module – STSClientModule. It makes it possible to make a call to the STS (Secure Token Service), request new security token and store it in internal cache for further use. Default and ready to use predefined configuration content for handling AGIV Security Protocol is provided in advance. For configuration details, see SAP note 1907963.

Mapping version comparison

You will be able now to track the changes done during development by comparing two versions of a message mapping object. The changes are grouped using a color code and any kind of changes are tracked, e.g. change of logic, structure, user defined functions, parameters etc. Embedded into the mapping editor in Enterprise Services Repository this really improves developer productivity.

For more details, please take look here.

XSLT 2.0 support for XSLT mappings

From now on features provided with XSLT 2.0 like xsl:for-each-group, fn:format-date(), fn:replace(), fn:upper-case(), fn:lower-case(), etc are supported. Therefore use an external transformer such as open source SAXON XSLT and XQUERY Processor and import them together with XSLT mapping as external archive. While setting the new global parameter com.sap.aii.ibrun.server.mapping.externalTransfomer to true the mapping runtime searches for imported transformer and uses it. For more details, please take a look here.

Connectivity Add-On for SAP Process Orchestration

There’s a new SuccessFactors adapter available as Add-On (and therefore release-independent, can also be used with former releases, e.g. 7.11) for flexible cloud deployment models with a comprehensive functional scope. e.g. login, logout and session handling; query insert, update and upsert (to create new records or update existing records, avoiding duplicate records) operations; automatic XSD generation for mapping purposes; delta synchronization; automatic data polling and many more. And this with no additional license costs as included as part of PI/PO license.

Please take a look here as well as at this SCN blog.

Enhancements for B2B Add-On for SAP Process Orchestration

Partner onboarding and management will become much easier now. A single repository for managing, storing and browsing all trading partner related information will reduce the efforts. Also multiple access points for enabling rapid partner onboarding and dynamic lookup of trading partner information at runtime is supported following a governed approach this information. And here the release notes of the B2B Add-On.

Furthermore several monitoring enhancements are available now, e.g. status view of technical and functional acknowledgement in message monitor, search improvements, or viewing messages content both in original raw EDI and EDI XML message format.

Please also take a look at this SCN blog.

Wow, really a lot of new features and enhancements you will get in the PI-side of the house. But let’s take a look now at the new BPM features.

Business Process Management Features

Handling of technical errors for service calls

With the new boundary event TechnicalError you can now handle the technical errors during service execution, e.g. timeout, configuration error while the related output mapping contains several important items (error message, time stamps, interface name, PI message ID, log record ID). With this also different error handling strategies in the process model can be defined, like Retry, Email Notification, Raise Alert or Create Task.

Get some more details in this SCN blog and in the release notes.

Value Help

Do you want to speed up your UI development? For sure, so make use of the built-in value help support. This could either be ABAP search helps or local DB value helps via JDBC data source using an internal cache for better performance. Also secured access via OData or Java API with role-based configuration is ensured. The configuration will be done within the NetWeaver Administrator (NWA -> Configuration -> Connectivity -> Value Help).

Please also take a look at the blog series and the release notes.

BPM OData Task Service enhancements

The OData Task Services have been enhanced with support for nested types, collections and task fault data.

Please also take a look at this SCN blog and the release notes.

BPM OData Start Process service

Use SAPUI5 to create a nice Web user interface to start your BPM process. With the BPM OData service you will get the currently active process definition and start the process.

Please also take a look at the release notes.

BPM Inbox enhancements

Last but not least, now the end user is able to forward tasks within the BPM Inbox without explicitly claiming them. So you can directly assign a task in status Ready without opening this task. This makes daily work in the inbox much more comfortable.

The related release note you will find here.

Hope you have enjoyed the information of these new features – so upgrade, make use of them and gain the benefits right now.

Additional information:

More about Process Orchestration and an archive of “What is new” overview blogs can be found in this library:

Introduction to SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration.

For a complete overview and further information of the enhancements with SP10, please see these release notes: http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw73ehp1/helpdata/en/08/2a277430214fbda9e06e88357e116c/content.htm?frameset=/en/a3/721c134fdb4f1fbe774cfbfa9be66d/frameset.htm

For a complete overview and further information of the enhancements with SP11, please see these release notes: http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw73ehp1/helpdata/en/42/68fefa73514cad827abade8dd9d7b9/content.htm?frameset=/en/a3/721c134fdb4f1fbe774cfbfa9be66d/frameset.htm