Session Management/Pooling While Integrating SOA With Siebel

Oracle SOA Integrations with Siebel require some kind of session management/pooling to be taken care of. In most common scenarios you maintain Siebel sessions from SOA layer by opening session, making subsequent calls to Siebel webservices and closing the session explicitly. There are other cases also where you may want do some session pool management within SOA by storing the session details (say custom DB table) and maintaining a count of the number of open sessions.

In this post I will cover the common approach of handling siebel sessions in Integration, it follows 3 basic steps:

1. Call a Siebel Session WSDL which supports some kind of ping method/operation and pass username, password and session type ("stateless") in SOAP Header to open a session on Siebel side. Siebel will respond back with a Session Token.

2. Use the session token along with session type ("stateless") while making subsequent call to Siebel wsdl for successfully connecting to the opened session.

3. Finally to close the session explicitly, send session token along with session type as "None".

A sample SOAP Header for request sent to Siebel is as below:

 <soap:header xmlns:wsa="http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing">
          <usernametoken>xxxxx</usernametoken>
          <passwordtext>xxxx</passwordtext>
          <sessiontype>Stateless</sessiontype>
 </soap:header>

A sample SOAP Header for response received from Siebel is as below:

<soap:header>
  <sessiontoken>xxxxxx</sessiontoken>
</soap:header>

Incase Siebel SessionToken expires before making subsequent calls, Siebel will respond back with some error message like Invalid Session Token or Session Timed Out or Session Token has expired. In these cases just reconnect to Siebel by making another call to the Ping method to generate a new session token. The Old session generated on Siebel side will eventually timeout and won't waste any resources as such.

That's it ! You should be good to create sessions and make successful calls to Siebel now.