Technical Articles
SAP Cloud Integration – Deployment status in the Integration Flow Editor
Introduction
With the 5.24.x/6.16.x release, SAP Cloud Integration provides a feature to show the deployment status in the integration flow web editor. In this blog, I will give a detailed overview on this feature.
This feature is described in the SAP Help Portal ( see deployment status in the iflow web editor).
New with SAP Cloud Integration September 2021 release (5.26.x/6.18.x)
With this release, we have produced an increment in the deploy status view where the error message will be shown for the deployed integration flow whose semantic/runtime status is “Error”. Please refer the section “Error message in the deploy status view of designer” for more details.
Deployment status feature in the integration flow editor has been enabled to address the following use cases for an integration developer
- To know the real time runtime status on the trigger of explicit deploy action without navigating to Monitoring page.
- To know the deployment status, runtime and other details such as deployed version, deployed by, deploy on for an existing deployed iflow in the deployment status tab.
- Easy navigation from the designer to the manage integration content of the operations view to troubleshoot the error cases.
- Show short error message for the deployed integration flow whose runtime status is “Error”. This will help Integration developer to fix the issue without need to navigate to the operations view.
Note – The first three increments are available in this release, however the fourth one would be available in the forthcoming release. You will be notified once it is available.
Let us have a quick walk through and understand the behavior of the feature.
Open the integration flow which is not yet deployed. You will notice Deployment Status as “Not Deployed” in the page header of the integration flow editor.
Image1: Integration flow deployment status is “Not Deployed”
Image2: Deploy status tab in the integration flow
Trigger the deploy action explicitly. You will notice a real time status in the page header. Deployment status is Deployed along with the timestamp and Runtime status will be “Starting”.
In addition to this, deployment status tab will be prefilled with the real time data.
Image3: Deploy action triggered.
After few seconds, the runtime status of the deployed integration flow would be “Started”.
Image4: Runtime status “Started”.
Now let us understand how the runtime status will look when the deployed integration flow goes into Error status due to some reason.
Deployed integration flow goes into “Starting” semantic status and other details are populated as well.
Image1: Deploy action triggered.
After few seconds, the runtime status of the deployed integration flow would go into “Error”. Integration developer can click navigation link to navigate to the manage integration content of the operations view to trouble shoot the root cause.
Image2: Runtime status is “Error”.
Manage integration content of the operations view is opened in a new tab. Integration developer can analyze the root cause and can solve the erroneous situation.
Image3: Manage integration content of the operations view
Error message in the deploy status view of designer
We show error message in the deploy status view of designer, if the deployed integration flow semantic status is “Error”. This shall help integration developer to fix some issue without switching the context from the designer.
Image1: Error message in the deploy status view of designer
Benefits
- Deployment and runtime status is known prominently in the designer. No need to navigate to Monitoring view to know whether the deployed artifact is started or in Error.
- Easy navigation to the manage integration content from the designer.
- Deployed version, deployed by and Deployed at details can be figured out from the designer.
- Short error message in the designer helps to resolve the issue by staying in the designer.
Points to note
- Deploy status is available regardless whether integration content is configure-only or editable.
- This feature is available in the following artifacts
- Integration flow
- REST API
- SOAP API
- ODATA API (Template based)
- We will bring this capability in other artifacts such as Value mapping, Script collection, Message mapping etc.
I hope, you can benefit from the feature presented in this blog post.
In case of questions or feedback, please feel free to comment on this blog.
Hi Kamlesh,
great and helpful feature!
I would kindly like to ask you to consider putting the deployment and design-time version also to the header, so that it is easily comparable if the latest version is deployed.
What do you think?
Best regards,
Malte
Hello Malte,
Thanks for the feedback. I think it would be useful to show design time version as well.
But in some of the cases, the design time version would be "Draft", mainly when INT.developer is modifying the design time iflow and saving without version. Will it be useful and value add to show "Draft" as a DT version? Let me know your thoughts.
Thanks & Regards,
Kamlesh.
Hei Kamlesh,
I agree that having stated draft will not be that helpful.
However, I think that displaying every time the same details at nearly the same position is easier to understand (also that your iflow is in draft). So I would also display draft status.
Best regards,
Malte
Hello Malte,
Thanks for reply and sharing your view. I'll take this requirement further. Probably we can show the design time version in the Deployment Status tab for a comparison with the deployed version.
Regards,
Kamlesh.
Another great feature that save a lot of time. It is always nice to know the iFlow deployment status upfront without further clicks.
Thanks Allen for feedback and sharing your view on this feature.
Great feature. Do you also consider to make the status actual LINK to directly jump to monitoring of that iflow? That would be another great and simple feature to save lots of time!
Hello Robert,
Thanks for sharing feedback. You would have noticed that the click on the link "Navigate to Manage Integration Content" of the iflow editor open the Monitoring view in a new tab, but it doesn't filter the iflow.
We have plan to enhance this behavior, but it needs some grooming and alignment. Nevertheless once this enhancement is available, it will notified via documentation and blogs.
Regards,
Kamlesh.
Hello Kamlesh
thank you for your answer. Indeed i didn't notice first that option, because I noticed it just yesterday while I was doing a "training exercise" on openSAP. however, if you are already working on that feature, please consider directly putting link to that content text (saying e.g. Deployment Status: Deployed on Aug 11, 2021, 23:54:02, Runtime Status: Started) because than you normally can access it by one direct click while working on flow - anytime. Potentially often the bottom bar with option Deployment status is whole hidden and you need to click to see it. Than also you need to access that tab before clicking the link itself - this all seems funny but doing 1 click only instead of 3 clicks, will bring the speed, yes at least 3 times
Hello Robert,
The idea was to show the most prominent deployment details such as deployment status , deployment datetime and runtime status on the page header of the iflow web tooling and for other additional details such as deployed version, deployed by and navigation link in the property tab of the iflow editor which can be leveraged on demand basis as and when required.
For an example when the deployed iflow is in the error state and if it is not solvable via a short error message ( next enhancement, stay tune !) then I would like to navigate to the monitoring view via easy navigation link from the designer to troubleshoot further.
Nevertheless, if you think navigation link in the page header would be useful for an end user regardless the runtime status then let me assess and groom this requirement. Thanks for your feedback and observation sharing.
Thanks & Regards,
Kamlesh.
Thank you. I really appreciate our voice is heard. any improvement from getting several "clicks" directly to get by one click to most wished content is helpful. i also don't want to have "overcrowded" options sometimes, but if that is smartly designed, or configurable, why not. one such great things was automatic next step proposal when building flow. i know it's based on AI but is really so smart and speed up your choices! 🙂 thanks!
Thanks for explanation and yes I'll log your ask in a backlog to consider in the future increments.
It would be nice in the Overview list of artifacts in a package if you could see easily next to the current version, also the current deployed version. At the moment you see only the current version of the artifact, but without going into the details of a specific artifact you don't see immediately the deployed version to recognize if the latest version has not been deployed yet. Also a warning flag in the artififact list to show if there was a deployment error. like you mentioned in the article "No need to navigate to Monitoring view to know whether the deployed artifact is started or in Error". but still i would have to open each artifact individually... would be nice to see in the list.