Most of my application integration discussions with customers revolve around their ERP business. It is a core unit within any organisation, and more times than not, it lacks the proper surrounding tools to automate and connect to the other applications and systems.
That is where the Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) steps in. It provides a framework for integration and process automation that provides a fast and very clear business advantage to the ERP business.
Interesting how we still talk about removing data silos in 2021 π
The use case
Importing Files into ERP, whether its Journals , POs or Invoices, it’s the most common use case I come across.
I will show how to build a simple Integration to read a file from an FTP directory and import it into ERP.
It’s worthwhile mentioning that Oracle ERP has a process called FBDI which simplifies the import of files. It provides templates and a framework to manage the import of those templates. In the old days one would need to insert data directly into the objects tables π±
The ERP Adapter for OIC
The ERP adapter for OIC obviously supports the FBDI import, and on top of that it also handles the Callback, making the whole process easier.
You can check all the details here.
Create a Scheduled Integration
The first step is always to create all the required Connections – in this case we need the ERP and FTP.
Once that is done create an Integration of type Scheduled.
Add an FTP Connection
The import file is located in an FTP directory, and for that we will use the FTP Adapter.
The Operation is : Download File
Specify the Input Directory – path to your folder, and the File Name.
It is very important to mention that our file is already in the proper FBDI format (as defined per the template) and the zip file contains the data file and the properties file. This is also as per ERP FBDI definition. If you don’t have it ready, you can perform extra steps in the Integration to create such a file.
Add the ERP connection
We bring to the canvas the ERP connection.
The desired Action is: Import Bulk Data into Oracle ERP Cloud
For the Operation, search for Import Journals.
At this point I will leave the Callback option un-selected, but in another post this will be covered.
Map the request
As always, the mapping activity comes at the end.
The FileReference is mapped and do not forget to also map the Filename (as it is mandatory).
Add a notification
As something extra I added a notification action, which will send an email with a subject and body.
The subject is a concatenation of the attribute result from the LoadERPData response
Activate and Test
This is how the integration looks now and its ready to be activated
Once this is submitted we can verify the monitoring and assert if all went well. It did in this case π
We can also log in to ERP Fusion and search for the imported file.
And finally the notification email with some information
If you pay attention to the result attribute , you can see the process id of the import file task in Fusion – I was expecting a status result instead, but that’s on me for not reading any documentation π