How do you Document your SAP CPI Iflows

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Documentation of integration has always been a strange thing. It has been pretty difficult to make sure we documented the details correctly and had enough information with. Normally you will just get some document designed to document some other thing and then try to adapt it to your integration. That will never give a good result. You may be compliant but just a waste of time if the documentation is not useful.

For SAP PI/PO we have for ages been using a Word template for the documentation of each interface. We support that with the Figaf IRT tool, so you can generate it fast. You can see an example of the SAP PI documentation here. The inspiration was to avoid having the documentation that was never updated and always had the initial version.

SAP Best practive

I did find an example of a SAP CPI template in the best practice guide. I did not like if for a few assumptions:

  • It was focusing on the wrong things that were a bit to detailed and too generic. Like a file conversion, or mapping it just has empty tabs that users need to fill in.
  • It could not be automated every well, which ment it did require a lot of user governance to host the information
  • It was juggling 3 different adapters and not showing the required details

I wanted to improve the process and make it even easier to capture the most important part of a CPI Iflow. It ended up with the following information:

  • Overview of the iFlow header information like name and description
  • History of changes logged with business requirements
  • Connection sender and receiver together with information
  • Test cases you have created for the tool
  • Flow description which is a table representation of the iflow. It will give some overview of how the different steps are connected
  • Configuration parameters configured in the full landscape, so you got some information on what is being used and the relavant resources.
  • Resources and the lat change data for them.

You can download an example of the document here for the SF to AD iflow.

Documentation Packaged_Integration_SF_EC_to_AD_Create_User_AccountDownload

There are ways to improve the document with more information. If you have anything that you think will provide value and make it easier to understand the documentation. Do let us know.

Automated documentation does have some limits like being able to update it different places, and add the extra information that makes sense.

You can try it own on your own iflows and see how it performs in your landscape.

Try IRT cloud and create your documentation

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Webinar replay: How to develop and release faster on SAP CPI

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So, Tuesday 5., March I did a webinar on how you can make an SAP CPI development flow much faster with the use of Figaf IRT. The goal was to show how much faster using Figaf IRT would be when working with SAP CPI.

I did get some pretty good feedback on the tool and the flow we support, and that it could be useful in a number of different projects. It was pretty fast-paced but demos to show all functionalities.

In the webinar, I show how the tool can make it a lot easier to do some common tasks a lot faster. 

The support part of the process

For the support part of the process, I covered:

  • A preview of our upcoming message monitoring solution that will allow you to give monitor access to individual users and query multiply iflows at the same time.
  • Our alerting mechanism that downloads failed messages or messages marked with a specific sender/receiver. 
  • Setup rules on the alerts so you can notify a business user that something is wrong or sent the message to Jira for people to follow up.
  • How you from the monitoring tool can setup reprocessing of CPI messages where you just interduce two scripts steps into the process

Many options with DevOps

For the DevOps parts I’m covering how:

  • You can document what is changed in an iflow
  • Run an existing test case on the iflow to see nothing is impacted
  • Add new test cases to solve your problem
  • Configure the system across your landscape
  • Transport the individual iflow to your different systems

It takes just 36 minutes but will give you a different of how you are developing SAP CPI.

Are you ready to try IRT Cloud?

So, after reading this blog and perhaps watching the demo video as well, I hope you are ready to try IRT Cloud. That is when you fully understand what the platfrom is able to do for you.

If you have any questions about how to get started or other things about IRT Cloud, do not hesitate to contact me. We are eager to understand which customer requirements that we can solve.

Try IRT Cloud for free in 30 days

IRT Transporting – Improve your SAP CPI life

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In this blog, I will cower how IRT Cloud will improve the way you work with transporting.

Before we get started, we need to find a clear definition of what “DevOps” are. According to wikipedia it goes like this:

“DevOps is a set of software development practices that aim to shorten the systems development life cycle while delivering features, fixes and updates frequently in close alignment with business objectives”

Understand what is changed

Track what object is being changed
– Is it a part of the BPMN model
– Is it scripts or mappings
– Is it configuration which is changed

Register changes with business reason

Make a service request in the IRT tool, that allow you to link the changes to the reason.

User can assign changes in iFlows to it:

Test the changes

With the build in testing tool you are able to test the modification you make does not not affect anything unexpected.

You can document what test you have run and the result of them.

iFlow configuration in the landscape

Configure an iflow once and then let IRT handle configuration in the landscape once importing the change:

Transport individual

Be able to import changes into target system. Figaf will import the object into the target system. Then configuration will be applied:

Check out the demo

So, I if want to check out how this work, please take a look at the demo video below:

So, I you ready to try Figaf IRT/Cloud to see, what IRT/Cloud can do for you? I offer a 30 days free trial at https://figaf.com/IRTCloud.

Signup to Figaf IRT Cloud

Transporting SAP CPI content with Figaf IRT

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We want to make it a lot easier to do SAP CPI transports and document changes, and it is also one of the things that i see people struggling with. I mostly also wanted to make it possible to transport individual iFlows, because it makes the process a lot faster; otherwise, you must create some packages to contain it.

A few weeks back i posted an image of me deploying a CPI change after just 40 minutes in production. One of the comments that, yes that is fine you can make changes in production fast if you do not do any change management. We did not have any change management or documentation. I would argue that with the changes you see below we can make it in the same time.

Another pain with transport was that you needed to reconfigure afterward. In Figaf IRT you have a central repository that allows you to configure what values you want across the landscape.

IRT will enable you to see what was before on in IRT. The easy way to do SAP CPI transport with Figaf IRT.


It on the Figaf.com/IRTCloud now and will be in the next release of our onpremish tool figaf.com/IRT soon. We still have some areas that we want to improve with the process, but it is better to get feedback on what you think of the solution. With the approach, we are not able to keep the old versions on the target system.

Read more about IRT Cloud

Full demo of Figaf on SAP PI/PO

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In this video, I’ll show how the Figaf IRT tool will make it a lot easier to support your SAP PI/PO development. It supports the following process:

  • Look in support incidents for SAP PI
  • Create a ticket that could be similar to an SCR but created and updated in IRT
  • Based on the object in the Ticket IRT find which interfaces need to be tested
  • Run regression tests on the test cases
  • If you want to record new test cases IRT can also make that easy
  • It shows how you can anonymize the data to comply with GDPR or other data privacy
  • Validate the transport on QA/Test system to see if all transported objects work there.

We will make a similar video with a full demo of Figaf on CPI after the next release. 

 

Many integrated functionalities

Our ambition in the ongoing development of Figaf IRT is to create a tool with many integrated functionalities, so developers don´t have to look at different places when they want to solve their problems.  IRT is taking care of all your problems, and our customers say, it is easy to use.

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