The course Web site provides the needed information for accessing the Web services and other project resources.

Look under the project section and the resources on the bottom. You will find links to the Web services (including access keys) and the project cheat sheet.

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This week we started looking at how Web services can be leveraged in SAP XI.

The first step was to look at how to expose functionality available in SAP XI (i.e., getting a product list through if_ProductList_SYN_OUT) as a Web service. The steps were demonstrated in class. However, I strongly encourage you to go through the Exposing Web Services from SAP XI yourself to get the process down ... again be careful to correctly create that service URL!

To complete the exercise you need to download the MyProductCatalogSite.zip and extract it on your local machine.

There is also an exercise for consuming Web services with XI . We will discuss this in our upcoming session ...

I have now copied to "Cheat Sheet" to the project folder on the G-drive. This document has some helpful information for the project.

By the way, I did a quick search for a "hotfix" from Microsoft for the WSDL parsing issue in Visual Studio 2005 that can be installed on Vista (or Visual Studio 2008) ... no luck so far. It is quite unfortunate that Microsoft can't get this right. Perhaps SAP XI doesn't produce the WSDL in the most common way, but it works with all the Web services testing tools that I have used (SOAP Sonar (Crosscheck Networks), SOAPScope (Mindreef), and XML Spy (Altova). While SAP has not been perfect with its implementation of Web services, this time its Microsoft's problem ...

... and I am still reading your papers and it will be probably until the end of the week, before I can give you feedback. We will discuss the reading, which was due today in the next class session, so keep your thoughts (and the email with them) regarding your questions/lessons.

MH

Technorati : BUS ADM 438, BUS ADM 746, EAI, SAP XI, Web services

Based on the blog entries I saw so far, it appears that most of you liked the online format and that the exam went reasonably well. And Yes, there is the danger in an online open book exam to spend too much time on finding the perfect answer and then running a bit short at the end. There is still value in preparing before taking the exam.

Everyone should have received some feedback regarding their term paper. Please let me know if you need further guidance.

Mary seems to appreciate the SAP XI mapping tool based on her past experience with mappings. In this week's lab everyone will put the tools to the test. ... Let's see how that goes!

MH

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Happy Birthday ... XML!

Well, it is a belated birthday wish ... The actual "birthday" was already on Feb 12th, but anyway XML is 10 years old and the W3C is celebrating (read more)

Jason pointed this out earlier last week in his blog entry and a link to an article about XML.

MH

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It looks like the first steps into SAP XI were not too difficult, as Lab #2 was completed much faster than I anticipated. It will get a bit more complex however, as you may notice when we start with mappings. But it is also more fun ... I think!

Also their seems to be some interest in integration and SAP based on experiences made at the career fair.

Paper

I have gotten some promising paper proposals and everyone (except for two who did not submit a proposal until now) should have gotten an email with some feedback. It looks like CORBA and AJAX are "hot topics". I have asked two students to find an alternative topic to CORBA.

Please make sure you read the instructions on the Web, particularly related to the length of the paper.

Midterm Exam

The exam is ready to go for both class sections ... you need to wait until the start date though, which is Wednesday morning. BTW, don't freak out when you submit the exam. The score you will see right after submitting the exam is incomplete, as there are several questions that need to be graded manually!

More in class ...

MH

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XML etc.

I mentioned that as a software developer you will be confronted with XML sooner or later. It was good to see some blog posts that supported this statement.

Did anyone go to the career fair. It was pretty crowded both with job seekers and employers needing to fill positions. It was also good to see so many companies with opportunities in IT. I would be curious to know, if anyone had a conversation with a potential employer regarding integration or SAP.

I only mentioned virtualization on the side, but Jonathan's blog post provided some interesting insight how virtualization is being adopted, not just on servers, but also PCs.

Also regarding the paper, I would like to make you all aware of the fact that we have access to Gartner Research at UWM. As Michael pointed out in his post, it is a great resource to find out about technology and current trends.

Blogging

As it is possible to "loose" the blog entry you are working on in the editor, either by navigating away from the editor or by just taking a long coffee break, as Steven painfully discovered, I suggest the following for longer entries: Write the words in a the text editor of your choice, then copy them into the blog editor and then worry about images and formatting. Even better, use an offline blog editor (I use Zoundry). Then you a) don't have to worry about "loosing it", b) can write something and post it later (i.e., airplane), c) can manage multiple blogs through one interface.

More later ...

MH

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Well, it is snowing again ... but the thing that makes it more interesting this time are the pond size puddles on our local Whitefish Bay streets that are slowly but surely turning into skating rinks.

So if everyone makes it to class we will dig more into XML and Web services and then explore different types of Middleware.

Some of you already worked through the little XML exercise and liked how Visual Studio supports working with XML. I also think for basic XML editing the Visual Studio tools work well. For more sophisticated XML work there are specialized tools such as the Altova XML Spy or similar tools out there.

The issues with the Web sites for 746 students should be fixed now as well. So everyone should be able to create their lab #1 project on the server. If you did develop your project locally first, it can be copied to the server quite easily using the "Copy Web Site" feature in Visual Studio. Just keep in mind that if you move your Web service somewhere else, all clients with references to this service need to be modified accordingly (i.e., you need to recreated the Web references)!

See you in class ... and get there safely!

MH

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Last week we entered the world of integration by distinguishing three levels of integration and going through an exercise that related to the data level of integration. I also presented an example of user-interface level integration. Mary posted an example of a real world situation related to user-interface level integration. We did not look at a concrete example of API level integration, but we will do a lot of that down the road!

Blogging was a bit slow this week, although there were some noteworthy entries, including Mikhail's comment on XML. XML will be the main topic this week, along with some hands-on Web development in Lab #1.

I hope I will have time to run through the XML exercise in class. In any case everyone should try to work on the exercise to reinforce some of the concepts related to XML and get some experience working with XML within Visual Studio 2005.

See you in class ...

MH

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As usual, the first week is just there to get started and get familiar with the course. Most students have successfully made a blog entry and some have already commented on the textbook chapters.

I do encourage everyone to try creating a test Web site on the course servers

For 438 use http://www.438.sba.uwm.edu , for 746 use http://www.746.sba.uwm.edu followed by your username and a name for your Web site (i.e., http://www.746.sba.uwm.edu/mhaines/testWebsite ).

Please do so as soon as possible, so that we can get over login issues etc. and become productive as soon as possible. Also, if you do need Visual Studio 2005 and have questions on how to obtain it, please let me know. (There is a free download for students in this course!)

MH

Technorati : BUS ADM 438, EAI

Welcome everyone to the first week of
Enterprise Application Integration course
(BUS ADM 740)

This is my (the instructor's) blog. Every student in this class also has their own blog (see blogroll on the right).
The blogs allow students and instructors to reflect on the course, report on their personal progress and challenges, ask questions, and let others know about interesting things that may be relevant to the course.

Everyone is required to post to the blog at least once a week. Sometimes post may be short, but there will always be something happening in the course every week!

I look forward to an at times challenging, yet overall rewarding semester for everyone,

MH

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test

So it looks like orders can be placed in the online store. I even got some confirmation emails for orders that were placed ... I'll be waiting for a bunch of head phones and amplifiers delivered to my door.

Obviously there are still some issues to work on. However, first a few things that posed a problem earlier but have now been resolved.

Issue 1: SOAP communication channel

According to internal testing the order process seemed to be working fine, however when calling the Web service, an error was returned. The receiver could not been found.

The reason was that in the sender SOAP communication channel definition the interface name and namespace were flipped. After flopping them back everything worked fine.

Issue 2: Merging two messages into one

Here is the situation. In your confirmation email you would like to include the original order id (and perhaps other information about the order) as well as the sales document number that is returned from the BAPI call. Both are in two different messages.

The solution is to define more than one source message for your mapping. If you look at the message mapping, you will see a third tab labeled "Messages". Under this tab you can add additional source messages. So you can have both your order message and BAPI response message as source messages. Your target message is the email service message. Now you can map data items from both source messages to the target message (including orderId and sales document number). You will need to redo the interface mappings related that use this message mapping. Also any business processes that use the mappings need to be updated to reflect the changes. However, for this project it is OK only to use a simple mapping with one message.

Issue 3: Product ID and price

Where is the product id and price for the product.

The product id is the MATERIAL data item in the BAPI data structure, the CONDVAL is the price.

Issue 4: Keeping track of the customer

How should the Web application keep track of the customer.

First of all, since there is only one line item in an order, we do not need a real shopping cart. All we need to know is whether the user is authenticated. If so the user is permitted to go on to the order page. This can be achieved by setting a session variable (i.e., Session("customerId")) to the id of the customer. BTW, a session variable can also hold an entire customer object. If the "customerId" is set to something (Not Session("customerId") is nothing ) then then the customer is authenticated and can order, otherwise direct the customer to a login page in which the session variable gets set (if the right user name and password are provided).

---

So now it is time to test the services ... as mentioned in the email the deliverable with the test logs is not due until Wednesday morning 10:00AM.

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I just found another free tool for Web services testing that supports basic authentication (so it works with the Web services exposed from XI).

It is the Crosscheck SOAPSonar (Personal Edition). It is limited to one Web service at a time, but that should work for the project. You can download it at http://www.crosschecknet.com/download/p_cust_info_try_p.php .

To test your Web service clear the existing project (File->Clear Project), browse to your WSDL. Then select the method that you want to test. Make sure you provide the authentication information (see tabs on the bottom). Provide the input values and hit send (white arrow on blue circle).

While I prefer to work with the Altova XML Spy, this works pretty well, too. The setup is straightforward, just download and unzip, then run the setup file. When you run it the first time you will have to provide your name and email to obtain the free license key.

... still too bad that the Web Services Studio 2.0 cannot handle basic authentication, because it is otherwise such nice lightweight tool :-( It seems that some folks on CodePlex are working on a similar tool, but that is far from being completed at this point ...

MH

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There are a couple of options you have testing a Web service beyond writing your own client application.

There is www.soapclient.com , for instance, where you can find a SOAP test client. All you need is to have the WSDL file in some Web accessible location and provide the URL to the WSDL file ,not the service endpoint (i.e., http://www.438.sba.uwm.edu/mhaines/WebServices/testService.asmx?wsdl ).

You can also download the Web services Studio 2.0 from the software tools folder on the G-drive which is a small SOAP client application that you can run on your machine. To run the Web service studio application all you need to do is to unzip the file somewhere on your machine (you do not have to go through an install process) and run the executable file in the bin directory inside the Web service studio folder.

The only downside with both tools mentioned above is that they do not support HTTP authentication. Unfortunately you need this if you want to use any of the services on the SAP XI system (You have to use your SAP XI logon information, empty domain. See example in the myOnlineStore code.)

For full featured SOAP Web service testing you can, for instance, download the Altova XML Spy (30 day free trial). This tool can handle HTTP authentication.

Another observation is that Web services on XI called for the first time sometimes time out. Just try a second time and see if it works.

I have updated the myOnlineStore example slightly today (4/20, Friday evening). If you got it already I recommend just copying it again. Now the employee list service really returns a list of employees, before it just indicated success or failure. Your product list will work very much the same way!

MH

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Here is some information about Web services that I provide that you can incorporate into your project. Also I zipped the myOnlineStore project that I created yesterday and put it out on the G-drive in the code folder. Feel free to take a look at the code.

The Web services can be found under http://www.438.sba.uwm.edu/mhaines/WebServices/ .

There is a MembershipService which should be helpful with registering and authenticating users. There is credit card validation service that works for real now, and the product image service that you can use to get corresponding images for your products (need to know the SAP product ID). The product image service still runs in test mode, but I will add pictures soon.

Also, regarding XI:

- let me know immediately when you are "stuck" working with the integration builder so that we can reboot the machine if necessary. This can happen if you for some reason loose your network connection before exiting properly.

- try to stay in your own namespace! The reason the Employee list example did not work yesterday was that someone (not to be named) - probably accidentally - changed my interface.

Let me know if there are any more project questions.

MH

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What a week ... I was always wondering when I would have to cancel a class and for what reason. Now I know!

It took an inflamed appendix.

This was also the first in other ways for me. I never had to undergo a surgery before, never got injected things referred to as "happy juice", or wake-up with three small holes in the abdomen. However, I was told that this is much better than a cut, as it was done before laparoscopic appendectomy was available ... and I already feel a whole lot better 5 days later.

This week we will have a guest speaker from Children's Hospital to speak about integration issues ... I guess I am ready for this know after going through some of the data collection processes myself in the past week.

Now it is time to pick things up again. The end of the semester is not that far away and one major task still lies ahead, the team project. We need to get up to speed regarding the client application development.

The hope here is that students can leverage skills and knowledge obtained in previous classes. But it will also be important to discuss within each teach what the individual development strengths are and decide who is going to work on which aspect of the project (Web application development, Web services, interface and process definitions in XI, documentation, ...).

The next key step is setting up the services described in the (revised) service design, so that the client developers can get started, while the implementation of the services is still being worked out.

Lab #4 reflects the key steps that necessary to implement any integration process in SAP XI. This lab will take some substantial amount of time to complete. Submit the lab log reflecting the current progress you have made. If the lab is not complete at that time, please indicate the last step you have been working on and what problems you ran into.

More in this week's class ...

MH

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The first papers have arrived in my email inbox in the past couple of days. The second step is to turn the papers (now Word documents) into rpML documents. The XML lab exercise should have prepared you to work with XML files in Visual Studio already.

Here are a few recommendations. Work with the rpml_3_0.xsd XML Schema and the rpml_3_0.xsl stylesheet. Both are available on the G-drive under the paper folder.

http://www.sba.uwm.edu/gdrive/Haines_M/BUSADM746%20EAI/paper/

When you work in Visual Studio you should remove the lines at the top of the XML document (if they are present) that refer to the DTD and the stylesheet (see example below).

<!DOCTYPE rpml SYSTEM "rpml_3_0.dtd">
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="rpml_3_0.xsl"?>

You can put them back later, if you want to be able to open the rpML file in a Web Browser (that can handle XSLT) and see the formatted output.

Then assign the right XML Schema and stylesheet to your XML document in the tool (see XML lab exercise). You will then get the benefit of Intellisense helping you to create the right tags.

Also note that certain characters cannot be used within XML tags (only PCDATA). This excludes for instance the < character. You need to replace it with &lt; . Other problematic characters are & (&amp;), ' (&apos;), and all the "smart characters" in Word (i.e., smart quote etc.) ... use straight quotes.

MH

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The midterm exam turned out pretty well overall. The interesting thing was that the only person who thought the exam was very difficult (7) got the highest grade ?!?

Spring break also included a couple of interesting things.

One, the WI .NET User group meeting on .NET 3.0 ... didn't we just switch to 2.0 last fall here ?! ... Well, the good news was that hardly anyone in the audience of IT professionals that are heavily using the .NET framework and tools was really using it yet. And it will be probably another two years before VISTA will be adopted by most businesses. Nonetheless, the WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) and the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) offer some interesting features. If you want to find out more take a look at http://www.netfx3.com/ .

Two, I won the FlightSimulatorX at this meeting! So I finally had to get a joystick (I haven't had one for the past 12 years) because controlling an airplane with a mouse is no fun. ... but now back to work! As you should have noted the midterm is posted and more project information will follow soon.

BTW, If you are in a position in which you deal with .NET development it might be worthwhile to take a look at the http://www.wi-ineta.org/ . It's free ... so are the events ... and they usually give away a couple of things at the end.

MH

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A couple of you already made it through lab #3 - which is pretty good. Once issue that came up was the putting an accidental line in the receiver determination. This will cause the activation of this receiver determination to fail ... and subsequently the test as well. So, if anyone gets this error, go to your receiver determination and look at the mid section of the screen where the receiver is defined. If there is an extra line, remove it (place the cursor in the line and click the red minus icon).

Next week is Spring break. It seemed today in class no one has travel plans for the break, so I guess you are all working on your research paper for the course ;-)

MH

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It could almost be considered a heat wave ... relatively speaking. Anyway it was warm enough to take the bike to work! Of course this meltdown may be short lived looking at todays weather forecast.

Now back to the course ... It seems that Lab #2 went well. The first encounter with XI can be somewhat overwhelming. As mentioned in class, there are quite a number of different tools that work together and it takes a some time to get the hang of how they work.

As a side note the XI system will be down this weekend and Monday.

MH

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