#1033 - OIC Integration Basics - Lab 5 OIC Connections

Introduction

This lab discusses OIC Adapters and the connections you create based on them. It also discusses the connectivity agent in a bit more detail.

Connections, Connections, Connections

OIC ships with lots of adapters, from which you can create your connections to various apps and technologies -

The beauty with connections is they mask the complexity of the apps or technologies with which you wish to connect. Together with the functionally oriented design time wizard, they take care of the underlying plumbing - which api to call, authentication etc. -allowing you to concentrate on what needs to be done.

OIC has a bi-monthly release cycle, most releases including new adapters and enhancements to existing adapters.

Before using an adapter, ensure you read the relevant adapter doc. 

These docs are available here.

Many of the adapters support Trigger and Invoke, remember the DB connection from Lab2?

Trigger (Inbound) - means this connection can trigger/start an integration flow. Think of an integration that is triggered when a new row is entered in a database table. 

Invoke (Outbound) - means this adapter can be used within an integration orchestration to invoke a 3rd party app or technology. This is what we did in Lab 2.

Some adapters, such as Coupa Sourcing, only support Invoke.

Ergo, before designing your integration, you need to consider the apps involved as well as the use case. Are these business SLAs involved e.g. integration has to happen in near real time etc. 

If OIC has adapters for the apps involved, then check out the specific adapter documentation to see exactly what the adapter supports. The Fusion adapters, for example, provide comprehensive support for all use cases, but this cannot be guaranteed for all adapters. 

The Primavera P6 EPPM adapter documentation, for example, provides detailed information on what capabilities it supports and also discusses usage restrictions. 

Creating a Connection

Creating a connection in OIC is easy. Generally, you specify the application endpoint and authentication details. Here again is the DB connection from Lab 2 - 

This connection is to the Oracle DB running on my laptop, thus localhost.

So how does OIC connect to my local DB at runtime? That's through the Connectivity Agent, selected below.

Lab 2 briefly discussed the connectivity agent. It is a lightweight Java based engine that must be installed on the same network as the target app, in my case, my DB. Since my DB is running locally, I download the agent from OIC and install it there.

The Agent can be downloaded from here - 

Simply unzip the downloaded file - 

Agents work on the call home principle - they make REST calls to OIC asking for work. These agents do that very efficiently. The agents need to belong to an Agent Group. This you create by clicking the Create button shown above.

 

 

 

Download config from the agent group. This config file contains the data needed by the agent to connect to OIC.

Replace the default InstallerProfile.cfg with the file you downloaded. 

There are some basic system pre-reqs for the connectivity agent, check out the docs here.

Starting the agent is easy, as I'm on Windows, I just open a cmd box and enter - java -jar connectivityagent.jar - 

The full agent documentation is available here. 

It also lists which adapters work with the connectivity agent - this is not the full list, so please refer to the docs.

Rapid Adapter Builder

There are a plethora of apps out there and OIC does not have adapters for all of them. What we do have though is the Rapid Adapter Builder (RAB). With this utility, you can build your own adapters for 3rd party REST apis, in a declarative manner; no coding, huge productivity!

Use of the RAB is out of scope for this OIC basics series, but I do have posts on this subject here. 

The RAB utility can be downloaded from the MSFT Visual Studio Marketplace - 

Summa Summarum

This lab has looked in depth at OIC Adapters / Connections as well as the OIC Connectivity Agent. We also discussed the Rapid Adapter Builder, which allows you to create your own REST based adapters.

The next lab looks at OIC Projects and some other OIC artefacts.