Oracle Document Editor - Defining a custom message (Part 3 of 3)

When your definition is ready you may test it in the Analyzer/Data tab as follows. You may also generate a test sample with the Analyzer.

After testing a sample you can see the value of each element in the message structure and the errors (if any) to correct.

The final step is to generate the XSD. To do that just navigate in the main menu to File -> Export and select "Oracle 2.0".

You can generate the xsd with default configuration or check the box "Show Advanced Option", in which you may, for example, set the namespace and the structure of the field names. In the example below I'm specifying the field names as NodeID_NodeName.

In the following window of the wizard it's recommended to check the option "Suppress Enumeration in XSD" if you have code lists, otherwise they would be included in the XSD, since the ECS is used for validating and translating this information is not needed in the XSD and reduces it's size considerably.

After finishing your document definition and generating the schema you are ready to create your B2B document definition. However have in mind that for Positional Flat File documents, as in this example, you also need to generate the Parser ECS.

For information on how to generate the parser schema check out the post Oracle B2B 12c Positional Flat File and Charset Configuration

Oracle BPM 12c - Issues with BPM Composer when running on Solaris

I have recently been facing several issues with BPM 12.1.3.0.1 running on Solaris when using the BPM Composer.
Two of those issues are easily fixed by adding a couple of extra Java properties to the respective environments set files.

1. Error when creating a Space or a project in the BPM Composer
   
   If you receive one of the following errors when creating a Space or a project in the Composer check Doc Id 1917397.1
   
   svn: E160004: Can't read length line from file /opt/oracle/products/fmw_1213/user_projects/domains/_dev/bpm/bac/_server1/repositories/da5fcb6a-ecd1-4fe3-9e9c-210870402281/db/fs-type: /opt/oracle/products/fmw_1213/user_projects/domains/_dev/bpm/bac/_server1/repositories/da5fcb6a-ecd1-4fe3-9e9c-210870402281/db/fs-type (Permission denied)...
   oracle.bpm.bac.subversion.server.repository.exceptions.RepositoryException: org.tmatesoft.svn.core.SVNException: svn: E200030: CANTOPEN
   
   This issue only occurs on Solaris and can be fixed by adding the following property:
   -Dsvnkit.useJNA=false
   to the JAVA_OPTIONS in commENV.sh under oracle_common/common/bin
   
   
2. Error when creating Webforms on the Composer or deploying a BPM project with Webforms
   
   If you receive the following error when creating Webforms on the Composer or deploying a BPM project with Webforms:
   
   java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class sun.awt.X11GraphicsEnvironment
   
   Add the following property:
    -Djava.awt.headless=true
    to the JAVA_OPTIONS in setDomainEnv.sh under <domain_home>/bin

Oracle Document Editor - Defining a custom message (Part 2 of 3)

In the 1st part I focused on the Message Segments, now I will start populating the first segment.

A Segment can have, as seen below, three types of child nodes: Field, Composite (group of fields) and Union (of fields/composites)

When creating a Field there are a couple of properties to define.

In the case of a PFF document you have extra properties, namely Justification, Padding and Format, as seen above.

This will define how an element will be presented on the PFF document since each field needs to be fully populated.

When the field is a String, the common values for Justification and Padding are Left and Space respectively, whereas if the element is a number (Type "Display") the Justification should be Right and Padding of Zeros as to have, for example, "001". 

For the Min Length value it's a good practice to set it to "1" to avoid errors, unless you know the exact size of the values that will/can be in that field (not counting with padding since padding is added automatically to fill the Max Lenght size when B2B transforms a message to your PFF document).

After creating a field you will see a Property window similar to the following.

In the above picture, on the top right there is a textbox for the position of the node in the tree, you can press the round button where the mouse is pointing to automatically set/update the position of the existing nodes.

To change the position of nodes you can either use Cut/Copy + Paste or click on right mouse button and use the Move options.

In the properties window of a Field you can define the level of requirement or even "hardcode" a value.

However there are some properties like type and size, which are defined when creating a field, that cannot be modified in this properties view. To modify them you have to change the view from Guideline to Dictionary in the View menu.

In the Dictionary view you can see all the nodes in your document and edit the properties defined upon creation of each node.

In case you want to validate the content of a field from a list of possible elements you can create a Code List.

And populate it as below.

You may also change the list after creation in the properties tab.

In the final part I will focus on testing and generating the files needed by B2B.

Oracle Document Editor - Defining a custom message (Part 1 of 3)

Oracle Document Editor is an application used for creating and testing document definitions for Oracle B2B.

The document definition (ECS) file is required in B2B for translating and validating documents.

With Document Editor you are able to create new guideline documents or use a template from the comprehensive library of standards available for download. You can download Document Editor and the standard definitions available here.

The available document guideline templates include EDI, HL7, positional flat file (which includes some SAP iDocs), XMLSchema and so on, as seen below.

Thanks to the countless templates available you can easily and quickly create a message definition (ECS) and respective XSD to import to B2B. Making the necessary changes if needed.

Below is an example of a message definition from the template library.

However, specially with Positional Flat File (PFF) messages, you might have to create a custom definition.

In this post I will go through the steps needed to create a custom PFF document definition in Document Editor. This post will be divided in 3 parts, in the first part I will focus on Message Segments', afterwards I'll cover the Field's types and properties, finalizing with testing and XSD generation.

Let's start by creating an empty definition.

The first step will be to create the Message segment, which constitutes the root node.

After defining the root you are able to add two type of child nodes: Segment and Group (of segments).

 I will start by creating the first Segment of the message.

And defining it's properties.

As can be seen above you can define the level of requirement and the number of usages of Segments and Groups. There are various possibilities as for example Mandatory & Must use or Optional & Used.

In the picture below I am creating a Group

And defining it as Optional with the possibility of appearing numerous times.

In the next part I will focus on a Segment's child nodes.

Oracle B2B 12c Positional Flat File and Charset Configuration

Oracle B2B supports the processing of various protocols and types of messages, however, sometimes extra configurations are needed to support special cases. For each protocol type there is a charset file associated to it, containing the allowed characters.

In my case, we were receiving Position Flat File (PFF) messages with the German char “ß” in it, which is not part of the default PFF charset. Fortunately B2B is flexible enough to allow the modification of said charsets.

In this post I will tackle the two tasks needed to able to add this PFF document to Oracle B2B 12c, namely Generating the ECS parser schema and modifying, if needed, the default PFF charset on B2B.

Oracle Document Editor is an indispensable tool to create message definitions for Oracle B2B documents and will have an important part in both tasks.

First I will quickly describe how to generate the parser schema for your PFF document on Document Editor and add it to B2B and, afterwards, I will describe the steps required to modify the default PFF charset used by B2B.

1. Generate ECS parser schema

When you define a PFF document you need to create a parser schema and add it to the XEngine.

To do that start by opening your message definition on Oracle Document Editor and navigate in the menu to Edit -> Generate Parser Schema and generate the parser as seen bellow.

If you receive more than one message per file and want to process them as one just remove the check from "First record in the guideline starts a new message".

Next navigate in your server’s folder structure to {Middleware_home}/soa/soa/thirdparty/edifecs/XEngine/config and:

1. Add your parser ecs file in the “schema” folder;


2. Edit the XERegistry.xml file and add an entry as shown below under “Positional flat parser schemas”

To conclude restart the SOA server.

2. Modify the PFF charset

In case the PFF messages going through your B2B system use characters not included in the default charset, you will have to add them to the list of allowed characters. This is done by creating a custom charset for the specified Guideline Type (you can also specify the Standard and Version) which will override the default charset for the corresponding documents.

To accomplish this you will need to create a custom charset on Oracle Document Editor as follows:

1. Open Oracle Document Editor and navigate in the menu to Tools -> Environment -> Character Set Registry as seen here bellow

2. Duplicate or Create a charset, in this case I duplicated the Delimited Flat File CS as it had almost everything I needed and changed the Guideline Type combo box “Positional”


3. Make the needed changes, as for example in the picture bellow

4. Export your newly created charset.

Afterwards, navigate in your server’s folder structure and:

1. Add your custom charset to {Middleware_home}/soa/soa/thirdparty/edifecs/XEngine/config/charsets
   


2. Add an entry on {Middleware_home}/soa/soa/thirdparty/edifecs/Common/Modules/XEngine.dat as seen bellow

Finally, restart the SOA server.

Error 503 when Launching Enterprise Manager

I have recently faced an issue on a domain migration where, when accessing the Enterprise Manager console, the following error was shown: "Error 503-Service Unavailable".

In fact, after some investigation I noticed that the EM application was running and configured properly on the Weblogic.

By reading the Doc ID 1297193.1 on My Oracle Support I was able to figure out that the actual missing configuration was on the targets.xml file that holds the information of the Farm Domain the EM shall be targeting.

This targets.xml file is located under:
MW_HOME/user_projects/domains/<your_domain>/sysman/state

and has the following information details:
<Target TYPE="oracle_ias_farm" NAME="Farm_%DOMAIN-NAME%" DISPLAY_NAME="Farm_%DOMAIN-NAME%">
<Property NAME="MachineName" VALUE="%ADMINSERVER-HOST-NAME%"/>
<Property NAME="Port" VALUE="%ADMINSERVER-PORT%"/>
<Property NAME="Protocol" VALUE="%JMX-PROTOCOL%"/>
<Property NAME="isLocal" VALUE="true"/>
<Property NAME="serviceURL" VALUE="%SERVICE-URL%"/>
<Property NAME="WebLogicHome" VALUE="%WEBLOGIC-HOME%"/>
<Property NAME="DomainHome" VALUE="%DOMAIN-HOME%"/>
</Target>


On my case, this file was empty so I had to add the necessary information for the EM application to connect to my target Farm:
<Targets>
<Target TYPE="oracle_ias_farm" NAME="Farm_soa_domain" DISPLAY_NAME="Farm_soa_domain">
<Property NAME="MachineName" VALUE="myhostname.com"/>
<Property NAME="Port" VALUE="7001"/>
<Property NAME="isLocal" VALUE="true"/>
<Property NAME="Protocol" VALUE="t3"/>
<Property NAME="serviceURL" VALUE="service:jmx:t3://myhostname.com:7001/jndi/weblogic.management.mbeanservers.domainruntime"/>
<Property NAME="WebLogicHome" VALUE="/u01/app/oracle/Middleware/wlserver_10.3"/>
<Property NAME="DomainHome" VALUE="/u01/app/oracle/Middleware/user_projects/domains/soa_domain"/>
</Target>
</Targets>

More information on this issue on My Oracle Support.

eProseed has accomplished it's first go-live with 12c technology

We are pleased to announce that eProseed has accomplished its first go-live with 12c technology working with CFL - The Luxembourgish National Railway Company.

With this implementation, CFL accomplished a high-reliable, agile and flexible integration platform across various heterogeneous application - existent in and off-premises - empowering CFL monitoring and control capabilities in addition to a faster customer on-boarding.

eProseed team’s expertise enhanced the new SOA Suite 12c capabilities enabling to deliver a short time-to-market solution based in standards and best practices that lays a solid foundation for future coming projects.

This first phase is cornerstone of a broader IT transformational project where CFL wants to put in place a full SOA platform capable of handling all the communications between its internal applications and their partners.

The synergies between the SOA 12c components, namely B2B and OSB products, are key for building a solid and flexible integration layer to implement a variety of interfaces that enable CFL to communicate easily and efficiently with all of their partners.