CPI – B2B – make it dynamic

Hi Guys,

Last week I had the opportunity to write a blog related to user dynamic receiver & interface determinations using SAP PO in the B2B world ( link ) and this week I want to share the same approach using CPI 🙂

Try to imagine the following EDI landscape:

1. Usage of EDIFACT
2. 1000 EDI partners
3. 20 messages types
4. 50 mapping variants per message type
5. 5 receiver EDI systems
6. The routing of the messages must be per agreement(IDs & message type)

Can you imagine this landscape following the ICA approach in your CPI tenant?:

Personally I can not imagine it, everything fixed, no isolation, no re-usability of the mappings or connections, in another words it will not work the real life scenarios.

So why not separate the IFLOWs in the following way:

1-Sender IFLOWS: these IFLOWs only receive data from your company or partners to the EDI system

2-Receiver IFLOWs: these IFLOWs only send mapped data from the EDI system to your company or partners

***for test purposes I deleted the receiver system

3-Mapping IFLOWs: these IFOWs only execute a mapping( EDI2XML or XML2EDI )

*** for testing purposes the mapping is putting in the body the result of the following camel simple expression: “${in.body} – ${header.mapping_iflow} – ${header.receiver_iflow}”

4-Receiver Determination IFLOW: here is where all the magic happen, based in the context you must determine the mapping & receiver IFLOWs, so you need to extract the context data that you need like identifiers & message type, and you can execute a lookup wherever you want to get the mapping & receiver IFLOWs:

• Value Mapping
• Business Rules
• Partner Odata API
• Custom Service
• TPM???( our dream )

***for the proof of concept I’m using http headers to decide which is the mapping & receiver IFLOWs must be executed

Let’s do some tests:

So if you use the endpoint of our Sender IFLOW, adding the two http headers “mapping_iflow” & “receiver_iflow”, and a dummy payload you will see all the magic in runtme:

After a few tests changing the http headers you can see the IFLOWs executed in the message monitor:

Test 1:

Test 2:

Test 3:

What do you think about this approach?.

Not forget, be curious! 😉

Max.