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.

Webcasts On SOA Integration Options for Oracle Ebusiness Suite

Came across these webcasts from Oracle Applications Technology Group regarding the various SOA Integration Options for Oracle Ebusiness Suite. I had already covered most of these options in an earlier post here http://myexperienceswithsoa.blogspot.com/2010/06/soa-integrations-with-oracle-ebusiness.html

These webcasts provide in-depth sight into the topic along with some demos. Check them out if you are pondering over how to integrate with Oracle Ebusiness Suite.

E-Business Suite R12 Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) Using the E-Business Suite Adapter
SOA Integration Options for E-Business Suite

NOTE: You will require OTN userid/password to login and access the content of the webcast.

Receiving Multiple IDocs Using Single Channel/Program ID In SAP Adapter

This is a very common problem with Oracle SAP Adapter. For receiving iDocs from SAP, we need to create a channel on the Application adapter tool and each channel is associated with a corresponding program id in SAP system. When we have multiple Integrations with SAP system, it becomes a maintenance overhead for SAP BASIS administrators to create multiple program ids for each of these integrations/idoc_types.

To overcome this situation and make sure we can receive multiple iDocs via same channel/program id, an elegant solution has been explained in the attached link.
https://blogs.oracle.com/ateamsoab2b/entry/soa_11g_sap_single_channel

Plan.xml Not Getting Updated Across Nodes In SOA 11g Cluster

Recently came across an issue in SOA 11g cluster environment related to Plan.xml.

After creating a data source in Weblogic Admin console, when you update the DB adapter from deployments section, at the "Save Deployment Plan Assistant" screen the data gets stored in the Plan.xml (MW_HOME/ORACLE_SOA1/soa/connectors directory). In a SOA 11g Cluster (lets say 2 node env.) this Plan.xml file gets created on both the nodes first time. However any subsequent updates on the adapter like creation of new datasources or updation to existing ones dont get saved to both nodes. Only the Plan.xml on node where admin server runs gets updated.

This would cause datasource errors/missing JNDI name errors when the environment is load balanced and requests are routed to the 2nd node.

This is more of a cluster configuration issue. The Plan.xml should be kept in a location that is shared storage for all cluster nodes. If this hasn't been done while setting up the cluster then every time adapter updation happens, the Plan.xml only gets updated on Admin server node. In that case the solution is to manually copy the Plan.xml from admin server node to other nodes and restart the managed servers.

Using DVMs in SOA 11g

DVM(Domain Value Maps) are static mappings between a source and target system which can be used in transformations. In SOA 10g, DVMs (.xml) could be imported into the ESB Console and during design time accessed via the lookupDVM XPath functions. I would like to cover the usage of DVMs in SOA 11g and how they can be extended/updated at runtime using SOA Composer.

Within Jdeveloper Right Click on your SOA Composite project and create a new DVM table

You can the use this DVM inside your XSL transformation using the lookupDVM function and finally deploy the code.

Modifying the DVM is equally easier. Just login to the SOA Composer (http://hostname:port/soa/composer)

You can edit the DVM after selecting it and once changes are done Save it and the Commit it. It should commit the changes to the MDS repository and make them available at runtime.

SOA 10g FTP Adapter Not Picking Files From FTP Server

This being my first post of 2012, I would like to wish all my readers a happy and prosperous new year. New year is time for resolutions :-) , apart from regular ones like "Will try to reduce weight" or "Try to keep my room clean" which never works out for me, I will definitely ensure that "I will share knowledge regularly".


New year, old issue. So decided to iron it out once and for all. SOA 10g FTP adapter wasn't picking files from remote FTP server after Jan 1st. Last file read was on Dec 31st. On further analysis found that the FTP adapter Control file had got corrupted.


The control file can be found under $OH/j2ee/home/fileftp/controlFiles/{processname~version}/xxxx/lastModifiedDate.txt


On checking the content of this file found below entry

#Sat Dec 31 23:21:55 CST 2011

lastModifiedTime=1356969420000

As you can see the lastModifiedTime shows as 1356969420000 (This is in milliseconds). This is Unix time or Epoch time and you can use the Epoch converter to convert it into corresponding timestamp.

http://www.epochconverter.com

After conversion it comes to:

GMT: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 15:57:00 GMT

This is where the problem lies. The lastModifiedTime has been set as 31st December 2012. As a result all files since Jan 1st 2012 are not being picked by FTP adapter because the adapter compares the timestamp on remote FTP server and only picks files which are greater than the lastModifiedTime.

What is epoch time?

The Unix epoch (or Unix time or POSIX time or Unix timestamp) is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 (midnight UTC/GMT).

SOLUTION

Stop the SOA server, take backup of controlFiles directory, remove the control files and redeploy the code , Start SOA server. As a result new control file should come into picture and FTP process should pick files correctly.

Why the controlFile (lastModifiedDate.txt) got corrupted at first place during year change...that is something which I have to figure out. Looks like a bug with Oracle FTP adapter. Will update this post once I get a confirmation regarding same.

Rotating *.out files in SOA 11g Weblogic Server

A very common issue in SOA 11g servers (Weblogic) is the inability to rotate *.out file using out of the box tools or scripts. We can rotate *.err and *.log files but not *.out files . As a result the server keeps hitting the 100% space utilization issue as the *.out file keeps grows to Gigabytes if not monitored correctly.

By default Weblogic doesn't have options to rotate the *.out file, so if we are running on Linux boxes, we can add the following snippet under /etc/logrotate.conf file and append a function to handle *.out files

(location of logs directory)/*.out {

copytruncate

rotate 5

size=10M

}

Basically the above function rotates the .out file for 5 times,once each file reaches the 10MB size and then it truncates the file.
For eg. *.out -> *.out.1 -> *.out.2 -> *.out.3 -> *.out.4 ->*.out.5 and finally *.out.5 is truncated and made to 0 bytes.

To schedule the above cleanup you can write a cron job as per your desired schedule which would call “/usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf” command.

That's it !! No more 100% space utilization alerts or server crashing due to space being full.