New whitepaper: How to create your SAP integration in 2019

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So, November 14. 2018, I wrote a blog post, The future of SAP Integration PI, CPI and how to prepare your self, about a webinar, where I talked about the key takeaways from SAP Teched and how to implement things based on. There is a lot of interest in the topic because it is new ground for a lot of customers and consultants. You will need to think about how you are using SAP XI/PI/PO and how you migrate/upgrade. The big new thing that you have probably not been able to avoid is how to use SAP Cloud Integration (CPI/HCI), and now all the extra services.

Now, I am happy to announce that I created a whitepaper about my thinking about SAP Integration in 2019:


You can download it from the Slideshare page.

And why is this stuff important? It is so, because already today you are working with integration, and you´ll probably have to work with a lot of new integration projects in 2019.

As always in something like this, there are functions that changes and you need to make it work in a different way. It is also difficult to capture all requirements for all scenarios so as always it depends on your strategy what to do.

In other words, if you have to be ready for all the new challenges, you have to understand where you are going, the current state of the SAP PI roadmap and how to make integration in a faster way. Once again, I would like you to pay attention to Figaf´s Integration Regression Tool, which supports the full lifecycle of integration. It is a requirement for how you are going to deal with integration.

If you like this, please share or leave a comment.

What is SAP CPI Best practice?

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SAP Best practice has always been the holy grail for SAP customers to follow. Then you knew that what you were doing was the best you could to work optimally with the software. SAP even has a lot of Best Practices for their ERP system S/4 HANA or ERP, that shows customers in certain industries how to maximize the use of the SAP software.

I’m working with the relative new SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI), which is a new tool to make SAP Integrations with. Like a replacement of SAP PI/PO, though it has some different options and flows.

On projects, I get asked

It is therefore often customers ask what is best practice?

There are many factors in place so with the relatively low number of finished implementation compared to SAP PI/PO. But I have no doubt, that SAP CPI at the long-term will enable you to design much better workflows.

There are at least three reasons, that you should be happy to be introduced to SAP CPI:

  • It is a much freer platform, enabling patterns in different ways
  • All flows are different
  • All organization have different requirements for logging, transport, and monitoring

Maybe it will be better at a later stage, when developers learn the tool more and have a few successful implementation projects.

Check out the video where I talk a little more about he concent

So, I would very much like to hear your opinion about your best experiences with SAP CPI. How would you describe the best practice regarding SAP Cloud  Platform Integration? Please leave a comment under this blog post.

And if you like the blog post, please do share it. I would appreciate it.

Optimize your SAP PI/CPI development

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Your SAP Integration development is not all about delivering interfaces fast. It is also about making sure that you do the proper Change Management for the interfaces. In all organizations, integration is playing a key role in the future of the organization. If you have SAP PI/PO or Cloud Platform Integration (CPI), then you probably have quite a number of projects to look at. It is difficult to get time to architecture, development, and QA because there are too many projects going on.

My presentation is built on a process like the following steps. And it is the same if you are using agile or waterfall. Sure there may be a difference in the step size, duration, and naming. But they will always be there. It is the following

  • Scoping
  • Development
  • Testing
  • Document
  • Transport
  • Validation
  • Go live
  • Support

 

The Figaf IRT tool allows optimize and automize the different steps in the process, so you don’t have to have all the manual paper tasks to fill in. You will get a much greater visibility in to what is developed of your SAP PI/CPI landscape. And then you are going to get just one landscape for handling all your developments since IRT support both PI/CPI in one common landscape.

In the webinar, I also get to show off the new data anonymization process that allows you to anonymize data, so you can do a good test with your HR data anyway.

You can watch the replay here. We did have some technical issues and the video did not turn out correct. So I had to create a new version of the video. I guess it is better because of the rehearsal.

You can start using Figaf IRT for free. We have a free package that allows you to test forever.

Yes I want to test SAP PI/CPI

 

Anonymize your SAP PI Test data

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With GDPR it is increasingly important to be able to mask or anonymize your test data. If I’m a customer at your company it would probably not be a good idea that you are testing with my order. But if you can anonymize it so nobody will know that I ordered it, you can do all the testing that you want. Normally it is something that takes a lot of time to do and then you don’t do it. We want to make testing easy so you will use it.

We can see at customers that it is a problem, and have now created a feature to you in 10 minutes can anonymize your data for test cases. Check the video below where I’ll create a new test data from my SAP PI system, convert it and then have my options.

After this conversion, you can run the data on all your systems when you have upgraded or someone is updating the mappings used.

We will add some more functionality to it. Like, have a names like first, lastnames, streetnames. It will be a list that you can edit and add names that makes sense in your organisation.

Also, I’m considering how to handle Service Interfaces with marked as sensitive data. I ‘m considering to set a flag that you cannot test with the data. And need to create an anonomized test case for it. And there could probably also be some user role that can view the un-anonymized data, and use the studio.

The flow of developing the test case could also be improved, but I guess we will take it with some real sceanrios.

You can start using Figaf IRT for free. There is a free package where you can get access to use it to test SAP PI/CPI test cases.

Yes I want to test SAP PI/CPI

 

Generate Test data for your Groovy scripts in CPI

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I wanted to develop some Groovy scripts but it is a little cumbersome to do it in CPI because you need to deploy, activate the script and the look at the trace. This takes quite a bit of time. I found Eng Swee Yeoh blog (How) do you test your Groovy Scripts. Here he shows how you can create a script to run your Groovy Scripts as on CPI, so you can do it in Eclipse or IntelliJ.

I just hate the manual job about setting up the correct content for a test case. So because we had the content needed in Figaf IRT we could automate the process.

We have added an implementation of the SAP CPI Camel Message class so users could create it. We have included it into the script, so you only need the public Camel Core. The implementation may not be fully complete but it is a lot faster than downloading all the required jar files as is described in Yeoh’s blog .

To view a demo of how this works check the following video

 

Download the libraries required:

  • Camel  and download the latest release of Camel to get the Apache Core, this contains the Camel Attachment
  • CPI APIs download the Generic API and the Scripting API.
  • Groovy JSON parser

If you use Eclipse you can create a Groovy Project, then add the above jars.  Then add the current groovy script and the generated to the project. You will need to change the location of the CPI grovy script so it matches. Once you save the payload in an Expression use the command ${bodyAs(String)}, then you will get access to the payload.

 

If you have ideas for improvement please share. 

Known limitations: For some headers/properties that are saved in org.apache.camel.converter.stream.InputStreamCache IRT cannot access the payload. You need to convert the payload to String before adding it as an attribute if it is binary.

Download the IRT application and try it out with your system. It is free for 10 Interfaces.

Download IRT now