Interact with E-Business Suite in SOA

Oracle Applications (OracleAS) Adapter for Oracle Applications provides real-time, comprehensive, bidirectional, multimodal, synchronous and asynchronous connectivity to Oracle Applications in Service Oriented Architecture. The benefit of using OracleAS is that it can use the existing Oracle Application Infrastructure and expose Integration Interface/ APIs as Web services to interact with SOA environment.

The alternative approach to interact with EBS is DB Adapter, however the drawback of using DB Adapter to connect to Oracle EBS is that – one has to set the context manually using the fun_global.apps_initilize or Fnd_Client_Info.SET_ORG_CONTEXT. This is usually done in a wrapper procedure in OracleAS. Moreover,  DB Adapter does not support the interface types like e-Commerce, xml gateway, business events for integrating with Oracle Applications. The OracleAS supports the following interface types for integrating with Oracle Applications:

• Oracle XML Gateway: XML Gateway enables bidirectional integration with Oracle Applications. It helps to insert and retrieve data from Oracle Applications. XML Gateway is a higher-level interface that exposes OAGIS-formatted XML documents for commonly used Oracle Application business objects and business interfaces. XML Gateway integrates with interface tables, Oracle Workflow Business Event System(BES), and interface views to insert and retrieve data from Oracle Applications. It maps the underlying table data to XML and back.
• Concurrent programs: Concurrent programs enable you to move data from interface tables to base tables.
• Interface tables: Interface tables enable you to insert or update data into Oracle Applications. The associated concurrent program should be running to move the data from the interface tables to base tables.
• Interface views: Interface views help you to retrieve data from Oracle Applications using the application tables.
• PL/SQL APIs: These APIs enable you to insert and update data in Oracle Applications using PL/SQL.
• Oracle e-Commerce (EDI) Gateway: Oracle e-Commerce Gateway provides a common, standards-based approach for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) integration between Oracle Applications and third party applications.

The Oracle Application Adapter comes out-of-the-box with the Oracle BPEL Process Manager (PM) product. OracleAS Adapter for Oracle Applications is deployed using the Oracle BPEL PM in Oracle JDeveloper.

Oracle Apps Adapter Architecture

Oracle BPEL provides a comprehensive solution for creating, deploying, and managing Oracle BPEL business processes. In design time, the web services are exposed as WSDL files and consumed during configuration of the Partner Link activity of BPEL processes. The Oracle JDeveloper provides a graphical drag and drop environment which is used to design BPEL-based process flows and Web services orchestration.

Design time iRepository: During design time, Oracle Apps Adapter configuration provides iRep window to select the available interfaces to be selected. From Release 12, Oracle Integration Repository is shipped as part of the Oracle E-Business Suite which enables Adapter for Oracle Applications to directly connect to the live database of Oracle Integration Repository querying for the public interfaces and then displaying the list of custom integration interfaces under the Other Interfaces & Custom Objects node in the Oracle Applications Module Browser. When one makes a selection through the module browser at design time, Adapter for Oracle Applications validates selected API against the database. If it exists in the database for a particular version of your instance, then the associated WSDL file will be generated successfully. Read the blog: What is Oracle Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?