Our company is currently involved in a project in which we will replace our legacy systems with an Oracle Applications ERP system. webMethods has been chosen as the integration tool to be used during and after the migration. For that reason, I am working on identifying the best possible way of integrating webMethods with the Oracle App.
Initially, I had in mind simply connecting to the Oracle tables via the JDBC adapter. I then heard Oracle came with an e-Commerce Gateway that would probably facilitate most of the integrations. Recently, however, I learned that webMethods had an Oracle Apps adapter (WmOAAdapter).
I was wondering if any of you have used this adapter and if you could tell me if it’s worthwhile. In other words, is there really an advantage to using the Oracle adapter versus simply using the JDBC adapter? Have you experienced any problems with the adapter?
If possible, please elaborate on what type of transactions you use the adapter for. I am interested in being able to create orders; retrieve shipment and invoice records; create, update, and retrieve product and customer records, etc.
Also, if you have integrated with an Oracle Applications system without using the adapter, I’d be interested in learning about your experience.
Unfortunately, nobody ever replied to my original post, so we are currently going down the path of the Oracle Apps adapter.
We are planning on talking to webMethods PS in the next couple of days and hopefully contacting a couple of customers who are currently using the adapter to learn about their experience. We’ll then begin testing the transactions through the adapter.
I’ll try to keep you posted on anything and everything I learn about the adapter and about integrating with the Oracle Apps as a whole. If you learn anything valuable about the same, I’d appreciate it if you could also share it with me.
I have found few interesting things about OA Adapter V6.0 during my study. Here are they:
If the transaction failed during Import process, the adapter doesn’t return the appropriate error message. In certain failure cases, no error is returned.
To execute the DB scripts related to pre-defined transaction services, ‘APPS’ DB user is necessary for configuring Oracle Applications Adapter.
To avoid connection related issues, the minimum pool size is set to 0. This, of course, degrades the performance.
For each pre-defined parent transaction service, webMethods hard-coded few parameters for running concurrent program. They are: Oracle Responsibility (e.g Inventory Vision Operations (USA)) and Oracle Applications User (OPERATIONS). This implies that the base transaction services need to be customized to use the user-defined values for the above parameters.
Has anybody encountered any other issues/limitations with Oracle Apps Adapter V6.0?
anything new on this ? I’m having similar questions now, we are buying WM IS and in the commercial offer we must choose between Oracle Apps adapter and JMS adapter. I’m not sure how much value the OA adapter will bring us, since we would only use 3 pre-built templates out of the many available, and we have experience with Oracle Open Interfaces table that can easily be populated with the jdbc adapter (which is part of the offer anyway).
Since the time I created this thread, our company has chosen not to purchase the adapter. For that reason, our plan now is to use the JDBC adapter to insert data into interface and/or custom staging tables.
It was due to external reasons that came down from management.
After running some tests through the adapter, our humble opinion is that the Oracle Apps adapter is worth it if you also acquire the Predefined Transaction Set and you are implementing several of the predefined transactions. We do believe that in that scenario, it would be a significant time-saver.
If, however, you are only going to deal with 3 transactions and you are already familiar with Oracle Apps (ie. the interface tables), then you may not get as much value out of it. But again, this is just our personal opinion.
Another thing that you may want to take into consideration is that I’ve heard Oracle is moving away from interface tables towards APIs. In that case, if you develop the transaction services yourself through the JDBC adapter, then you may be on the hook to modify it in the future. If you use the webMethods Predefined Transaction Set, then webMethods MAY take care of that “upgrade” for you. This is something we were going to look into, but when we found out that we were no longer getting the adapter, we let it go. Check with webMethods on that.
We are trying to find out a best integration methodology to achieve communication between webMethods and Oracle Apps. Were you able to figure out the best approach to connect with Oracle Apps? Oracle Apps has lot of API’s though which we can connect to interface tables. Can we make use of these API’s to connect to interface tables through JDBC adapter? OR should we go for Oracle Apps Adapter? Can any of you provide information on the issues/bugs, performance, scalability, limitations and stuff associated with Oracle Apps Adapter?
It’s me again. My company went back and decided to purchase the Oracle Apps adapter again. It’s now final. We got it!
I was just wondering: how have your experiences been with this adapter? Has it been worth it? Any pitfalls I should avoid?
A more specific question to those of you using the Predefined Transaction services: what user account are you using to connect to the Oracle Apps database? Our DBA wanted us to try a user different than APPS, so I was wondering if any of you had tried that yet. If so, what kind of problems have you run into and what are the advantages/disadvantages? Would I have to setup all sorts of synonyms or modify the SQLs by prepending apps. to the table names?