Product Information
Integration Advisor: Overview of components for building B2B integration content and further reading
Introduction
This is an update of the blog integration content advisor: Overview of components and further reading from March 12, 2019. It was necessary, because of the name changes, significant updates of the content such as blogs, training courses, and the strategic shift of the Integration Advisor. The Integrastion Advisor is now primarily focused on B2B integration content building. The names changes are in detail:
- SAP Integration Advisor capability of Integration Suite (short Integration Advisor) instead of integration content advisor
- SAP Cloud Integration instead of Cloud Platform Integration
- SAP Business Technology Platfrom instead of Cloud Platform
All the integration components at the SAP Business Technology Platform are embraced into the SAP Integration Suite as its capabilities. You’ll find more about Integration Suite at SAP Integration Suite on the SAP Community
The Integration Advisor isn’t just a mapping tool. It’s a cloud- and crowd-based toll for writing functional specifications for especially B2B integration scenarios, which can be directly pushed and deployed on runtime. The main purpose of the Integration Advisor is to provide intelligent and efficient content creation and maintenance at business domain level to support experts and citizen integrators without writing technical code based on a programming language. Artificial intelligence (AI) supports the entire approach for reaching the aim much faster, more flexibly, and with significantly higher quality.
As shown in Figure 1, the Integration Advisor unifies all the necessary components with a strong focus on usability, flexibility, transparency, and speed. The Integration Advisor supports all kinds of integration content building and maintenance, with currently a strong focus on business-to-business (B2B).
Figure 1: Components of Integration Content Advisor
This post includes a short overview for each of the five components and provides the most current links to more detailed blogs and further information.Quite important is that the Integration Advisor can’t be just compared with the classic and technical oriented integration content building tools like the message mapping tool that you find in SAP Cloud Integration or SAP Process Orchestration.
The Integration Advisor is a paradigm shift with the strong focus on, as I mentioned, the writing of functional specification on business oriented level. Therefore, in order to understand this paradigm shift, it is worth to have a closer look to the training courses and the mentioned list of blogs.
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General Information |
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In addition to the available set of blogs, and videos, there is now an OpenSAP training course available. All the listed content gives you a good overview on the paradigm shift and how to you the Integration Advisor in general and detail. |
Training courses:Open SAP Course: Integration Advisor Capability of SAP Integration Suite Open SAP Course: Accelerate Enterprise Integrations with SAP Integration Suite Related information:SAP Help Portal – SAP Integration Advisor Integration Advisor – Integration game changer! integration content advisor for SAP Cloud Platform Integration (to be updated) Videos: |
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Library of Type Systems |
The library of type systems is a centrally located collection of B2B, B2G, or A2A type systems. A type system has two main aspects:
These listed interfaces (message types) in a library of a type systems provide all the required information for specifying a Message Implementation Guideline (MIG), if this must be based on a B2B standard or de-facto standard provided by SAP. |
Related information:Discover B2B/A2A standard libraries (to be updated) Integration Advisor – new versions for B2B Libraries ASC X12 and UN/EDIFACT Integration Advisor – Odette Message Standard Integration Advisor – Now GS1 EANCOM Library available Integration Advisor – Automotive EDIFACT Subsets (JAIF, Odette, VDA) now available Integration Advisor – new versions for B2B Libraries cXML, ASC X12 and UN/EDIFACT |
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Custom Messages |
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The component “Custom Messages” is a library of proprietary defined schemas and interfaces, which are not provided by the “Library of Type Systems”. It can be build by just uploading existing XML schemas. Remark: These XML schemas have some limitations. A custom message could be also used for specifying a message implementation guideline (MIG) |
Related information:TBD |
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Message Implementation Guidelines (MIGs) |
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The Message Implementation Guidelines (MIGs) are used to specify the customized interfaces on business oriented level covering just these nodes and their requirements on which and how the information of message such as purchase order, invoice or despatch advice should be sent or received. MIGs can be created for the messages, which should be sent or received by the user’s company, or by the trading partners of this company. Each trading partner might have different requirements, therefore it is suggested to create one MIG per trading partner and message type. A MIG is the basis for the creation of mapping guidelines (MAGs). As more a MIG is precised on its requirements and properties, as simpler a MAG will be. |
Related information:Integration Advisor – Key concepts of a Message Implementation Guideline Create a customized interface using MIG editor The importance of customized codelists in MIGs Integration Advisor – The precision of semantics – Use of qualifiers Integration Advisor – MIG Qualification based on multiple Qualifiers !!!NEW!!! Integration Advisor – Extended semantic validation options for MIG structures Integration Advisor – How can I customize and generate Message Implementation Guideline hard-copies Integration Advisor – How do I document my Message Implementation Guidelines? Integration Advisor – MIG Qualification based on multiple Qualifiers Integration Advisor – support for multi-value Qualification in MIGs
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Mapping Guidelines (MAGs) |
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A mapping guideline (MAG) is used to specify the mapping between a source and a target message implementation guideline (MIG). The intention is that mapping guideline will be very simple without much coding on the mapping elements itself. In other words, we want to get rid of all the complicated coded functions and technical oriented functional expressions. This aim is not finished yet. Therefore, it is still necessary using functions for a number of requirements. But we will always let you know, when and how an improvement for reaching this aim is available. A mapping guideline also have an embedded simulation in order to reduce the debugging on runtime. The MAG is the basis for the generation of runtime artifacts.
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Related information: Integration Content Advisor: Create a mapping using MAG editor integration content advisor – Quickly create your individual code value mappings in MAGs Integration Advisor – List of supported XSLT elements and XPath functions Integration Advisor – MAG: How to create If-Then-Else Statements in Mapping Elements? Integration Advisor: Conditional Mapping Feature Integration Advisor – Mapping element functions for comparing nodes and values |
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Runtime Artefacts |
The runtime artefacts do not just cover the mapping from a source to a target scheme. It is a set of automatic generated processable schemes (XSD) and transformation scripts (XSLTs) for
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Related information: Integration Advisor – The Mapping Runtime Artifacts and their purpose |
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Runtime Support |
Currently, the Integration Advisor supports:
The generaed runtime artefacts can be directly injected into the prepared integratoin flow at SAP Cloud Integration. |
Related information: Support SAP Process Integration/Process Orchestration with Integration Content Advisor Integration Advisor: Functions at target side – Ordinal number for line items and segment count
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Summary
This post completes, for now, the series of blogs and information that explains the power of SAP Integration Content so you can use it for your own purposes. But there are still brilliant, game-changing approaches for accelerating integration content development in our backlog. Once they’re released, you’ll find an update here. So, stay tuned.