New feature for integration flow tooling: configuration scenarios

Better late than never: the configuration scenarios now officially arrive at the NWDS Integration Designer after being used as folder objects so far. A few customers asked for this feature because they missed the freedom in object grouping offered by scenarios. The folders in the PI Explorer only allow assignment of integration flows and/or value mapping groups and each object may only have exactly one parent folder. Configuration scenarios don’t have these restrictions and offer an alternative and convenient way to group technically or semantically related configuration objects.

Getting Started

Start the scenario explorer with menu “Process Integration -> Tools” or “Window -> Show View”.

Start scenario explorer with Tools menu

Start scenario explorer with Window menu

Scenario Explorer

Similar to its counterpart in the Integration Directory, this view shows the list of configuration scenarios and offers the main operations for objects (e.g. delete, activate, revert). The view’s toolbar provides standard functions: “create new scenario”, “refresh view”, “expand/collapse all” and “link to editor”. The latter will synchronize the tree selection of the scenario explorer with the currently active editor but will only react to active configuration scenario editors. Please don’t forget the small view menu which provides the preferred sort-direction.

Toolbar of Scenario Explorer

The Scenario Explorer provides the same context menu as the PI Explorer giving you access to all required operations for scenario objects and their assigned elements.

New Configuration Scenarios

Start the create wizard with the corresponding toolbar button or context menu.

After entering name and the optional description, you can immediately create an empty scenario or change to the next page and assign configuration objects. Please keep in mind that configuration scenario names cannot be changed afterwards (in contrast to folders).

Select “Finish” to create the new object and to open the editor.

Configuration Scenario Editor

Use the editor to change the scenario description or to add/remove configuration objects. The editor will display and retain an existing reference to an ESR object (e.g. Process Integration Scenario Models) but changes are not supported.

Configuration Scenario Editor

Add single objects with the corresponding toolbar button or context menu. Select the required object type first.

Select an object in the value help dialog and confirm with button “OK”.

Add object value help

Assigning objects to scenarios

You can manage more complicated assignment tasks with a wizard for “mass-assignment” located in menu “Process Integration -> Tools” or by selecting a configuration scenario’s context menu.

Select configuration objects and their target configuration scenarios and confirm with button “Finish”.

As an alternative, you can select a configuration object in the PI Explorer or Scenario Explorer and assign it to target configuration scenarios via context menu.

Select the target scenarios for the selected object and confirm with “Finish”.

Scenario selection page

Transporting scenarios

Finally, we added support for scenario transports with a dedicated page in the regular export wizard. You can access the scenario selection with object type “Configuration Scenario”. Please note that selecting a configuration scenario is not mandatory in this page. You can use it as well for arbitrary object exports in case you just prefer the scenario structure.

Conclusion

Configuration scenarios offer an alternative way of managing and structuring your configuration content and are targeted at those who find the PI Explorer’s approach too limited. If you are tempted to give this feature a try, we would really appreciate your feedback. Is there any functionality you are missing or are there other improvements we could do? Feel free to leave your thoughts, proposals and questions in the comment section below. Please also check our documentation for more details around this topic. Find more posts and Q&A around Process Integration and post further questions here.