What’s happening in SAP Cloud Integration ?

[former_member223443]

Introduction:

In the recent times we could see rebranding from SAP for their well known tools and application, in particular SAP Cloud platform area. The very famous Cloud platform Integration tool, now renamed as SAP Cloud integration from the SAP Integration Suite of SAP BTP. It’s worth mention that it is not just a name change or a rebranding to see, as whole a lot more changes happened over the Cloud Integration tool to ease the life of Integration developers in designing the business flows which reduces few of the development efforts. This means SAP is listening us 😊.

Firstly, thank you to the Team SAP, Mentors and all the contributors who made it happen. I thought to put all the features in this blogpost as a reference for those who start new with the CPI. This blogpost will not have long details, as we have many blogposts which are in detail for us, this is a quick few  minutes reader only for iflow designers. Come lets design our iflows in more artistic way, using modularization and reusable concepts.

1. Copy of an iflow: Copy one iflow into another package when we feel that most of the design steps and requirements are similar. This reduces the redundant design work.Provide with name of the new iflow


2. Copy steps in an iflow: Now the Pallet bar is added with copy & paste buttons, this enables us to copy a particular step of the Integration Process to another place or after any another message process step. This can even possible to copy it to other local Integration process of the same iflow.
   

   Select the required Step to copy and paste where ever we need in the canvas, highlighted

   
   
   

   Select the Integration Process or Local Integration Process and press paste icon.

   
   

   

   
   


3. Simulator: Most useful feature to test our desired flow steps to see how message got transformed with complete details on Payload, Headers and Property variables, just select the start and end points for simulation and then press Run simulation. We can clear our selections using the Clear simulation button on top right.


4. Deployment Status: Now we have view of our iflow deployment status right in the same design view. Look right down below the iflow name, we can see the status of the iflow and also at the Integration flow details tab named as Deployment status. We can also navigate to the Integration Content from here to look for more details.
   


5. Message Mapping test: SAP provided this feature to test our build mapping programs with sample test xml file unlike PI/PO. Simply upload test file in the Mapping editor itself and press Display Queue from any mapping expression or logic step of a required field to test. Also to run entire mapping we can do this using Simulation button at the right corner of the mapping program, here we can edit the values of any specific fields of source structure to see the result


6. Document Mapping: We can convert the Mapping transformation rules to a generic document with a click of button, this enables the mapping rules to an excel and downloads in your local system which you can use it for technical documentation. Also, we will find two other buttons one auto maps the fields and also sub-tree fields which are identical in name from source to target and other clears all the mapping rules defined in the current mapping program.


7. Remove unused externalize parameters: In edit mode of an iflow, we can remove the unwanted or unused parameters for giving an optimized iflow design look and for better documentation.


8. Auto Add flow step: This features enables us to add the next step in the iflow design, here it provides the suggested steps or we can add our desired message processing step from the list.


9. Add Resources: We can add Archive, Mapping, Schema, Script files from another iflows, ESR of SAP PO application, or from our local system repository. And we can directly use them in our iflow design. This can be done from Resource Tab of Integration Flow menu.


10. Script Collection: The very latest which I tried in recent days was Script collection. This helps us to maintain all reusable scripts in the package under artifacts Script Collection, these scripts can be used across in all the iflows of the same package reducing the duplication work of designing. This is should be done to two step: One create a Script Collection artifact in the package and add/create various scripts which we feel can be reused across the iflows of the business package. Secondly, Add a reference of type Script Collection in the iflow design from Resource tab, pointing to the above created artifact and final you can assign the script in the design script step.


11. Process Direct: Seamlessly call other iflows from the one iflow using this adapter, this would reduce the load on the CPI application. Use this by connector step and select Process direct adapter from the available list.


12. Search Step: The easier way to add the message process step is the search step, this helps in navigating through the steps to be used next in the iflow design. Its just a handy tool, in my view.


13. Syntactical Errors: The easiest way to find the errors/problems in iflow design, goto Problems tab and look for severity for errors you can navigate to that step by clicking the hotspot link in the location column.


14. Artifact Locks: A self service now provided by SAP to unlock you design time artifacts which were in locked state by any developer or by yourselves. Goto Monitor overview page and navigate through Manage Locks section to this Tile


15. Help: From any process step you can directly jump to its related help topic by pressing help button (?). Self learn and design, nice concept right. Thank you all for taking time in reading this post and hope this would help. Please feel free to comment on this blogpost. Have a great day!