Cristian Silipigni

Take advantage of using Recipes in OCI Process Automation

Today, Oracle Process Automation with its Recipes helps organizations to reach process excellence faster. The recipes are business process solutions developed with OCI Process Automation (OPA) and available for you once you have provisioned OCI Process Automation service.

Recipes can be deployed as-is, or extended to meet requirements customer-specific.

In addition, to expediting time-to-value for new deployments, the available recipes can be used also as a sort of blueprints for organizations who want to start with new processes built on OPA.

So, just to position the recipes and when better to use them, we can try to post some questions.

Are you a Developer and looking for quickly deploying new business processes?
Are you a System Integrator needing to start from a pre-built asset so to be later customized meeting better your needs without reinventing the wheel?
Are you looking for some samples to be used for demo purposes to test capabilities and functionalities without starting from scratch?

All these questions can find in the OPA Recipes the right answer.

Now, OPA includes the following recipes … and much more will come soon.

Every single Recipe has its own documentation to drive the implementer.

I suggest to carefully look at the system requirements before using those ones; all those recipes are intended only for guidance.

In order to run those recipes, you must perform the following configuration tasks on your Oracle Identity Cloud Service (IDCS) instance in order to successfully run the recipe.

Assign IDCS application roles
Create the required users in IDCS

After you’ve configured the roles and other resources, you can activate and run the application and test the process and some capabilities like business searches, how to escalate tasks using the native workspace or the analytics graphical view to see if the process flow is altered by manual intervention.

Now you can see how the “Credit Increase Request” can be imported into your own OPA instance:

Create a new process in the application process section

Click on the “Create Application from Recipe” action from the palette:

Select, for example, the Approve Credit Line increase

And now, you can see all the artifact imported in your application.

Selecting the “Credit Line Increase Approval” link, you can access the BPMN design of the process

The process is now ready for you to be activated (or customized) selecting the “activate” button at the top of your page

And now ready to be tested in the workspace

You can now start a new request and the web application will appear to you, something like that one here included:

You can load demo values to speed up the test so to quickly see the outcomes of the execution

A new item is now available to be worked by the assignee approving, rejecting, … all the actions that the human workflow will be configured for the specific user, group or application role

As we know, OPA can be used to support business processes to build “system 2 system” or “system 2 human” implementations and when the User Interface is required to interact with the running process you can also modify or extend the web UI leveraging the powerful features to adapt your web page, embedding basic and advanced controls so to drive the business user and simplifying his job reducing errors due to wrong data input

Try it by yourself… it’s a very good accelerator!!

Public and Additional Documentation

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/process-automation/recipes.html

https://www.oracle.com/it/integration/process-automation/features/

Oracle Integration (OIC) with Publish and Subscribe Pattern: How to Manage Events

One of the most interesting news of the current year is the capability introduced In OIC Gen3 few months ago. I’m talking about the chance we have today to manage events through Oracle Integration.

As we know, often projects require to decouple who can produce messages from who can consume those ones. This approach probably simplifies the integration approach making the applications independent from each other so that any change can be applied, for example, deleting/adding one or more subscribers, without impacting the implementation.

Of course, the decoupling can be built using external messaging queue solutions, something like OCI Streaming Service for which OIC can provide a native adapter or reusing what already used by the customer, for example a Kafka queue, quite common in real use cases.

The first approach probably enables the chance to provide an Oracle Cloud based solution built on top of OCI services delivering in this way an end2end solution based completely on OCI.

The second approach grants the customer to extend and innovate their own applications reusing what already in production adding with Oracle Cloud the most innovative technologies leveraging AI services, Autonomous Database, Oracle SaaS and much more.

At the same time, as explained at the beginning, it’s possible to manage such use cases directly from OIC itself without leveraging other components, or solutions. Everything is managed internally without extra effort in terms of resources or other software to be managed.

What required is to work with “Pub/Sub” pattern… something about the configuration of some actions from the OIC console.

So, to complete the case we need mainly to:

Create the Event type,
Create the Publisher,
Create the Subscriber

1.Create the event type

Starting from scratch we need to configure the event type.

OIC suggests a mockup as a payload just to provide you an example, but you can modify that one to adapt the format to your need in JSON format or eventually you can provide your own XML SCHEMA

2.Create the Publisher

Once defined the message type, it’s required to configure the publisher entity. To do it, you need to set up a new integration flow using one of the available patterns.

To define the Publisher, in my case I have created an integration flow with “Application” style, to include the Publish action from the palette which at runtime will push the message to the embedded event management system included in OIC. As you can see below:

After dragging the activity, you can see something like this:

In the “Publish” action it’s required to configure the Events type … exactly what we have defined during the step 1. In my case, the Event “NewAlarm” is what previously defined.

If you don’t have any Subscriber yet, when the publisher fires a new event, this one is retained for you in OIC keeping this one until when a new subscriber consumes that message as below shown:

3.Create the Subscriber

The last mile to be covered is about the subscriber. Now we can create a new integration flow for consuming Events as below shown:

Dragging this activity into your canvas, it’s possible to configure the Subscriber for the interested Event; in my case the “NewAlarm” event previously configured.

Now you are ready to run your sample just to see how it works.

Monitoring is fundamental to govern and check if everything works fine and above all as expected. Below some screenshots from the OIC console which shows the different levels of monitoring provided natively by the platform

It’s not a demanding activity; quickly you can do it by yourself… to understand how pub/sub pattern works on Oracle Integration

Documentation:

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/application-integration/integrations-user/create-integrations-publish-and-subscribe-events.html#GUID-EEF34575-1B8C-491A-9C22-0A8498DEEB02

OCI Process Automation and Oracle Artificial Intelligence in Action

It’s very interesting feature what recently delivered with OCI Process Automation.

It’s possible now to upload in your workflow a document such a passport, driver license, … documents from where it’s possible to automatically extract data.

No more manual procedures but everything managed by the solution to automate business processes.

This is a meaningful improvement of the OCI offering highlighting synergies and native integration among the big number of OCI services available in each OCI region of the world.

Artificial Intelligence is today the most relevant technology from which we can take advantage in simplifying our lifestyle, reducing time with bureaucracy, and getting a benefit from other several new services before unimaginable.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Document Understanding, what natively integrated in Oracle Process Automation, is an Oracle AI service that enables developers to extract text, tables, and other key data from document files through APIs and command line interface tools. With OCI Document Understanding, you can automate tedious business processing tasks with prebuilt AI models and customize document extraction to fit your industry-specific needs.

You can easily identity this service navigating the OCI Console in the Analytics & AI section.

With this service, you can upload documents to detect and classify text and objects in them. You can process individual files or batches of documents using the ProcessorJob API endpoint.

The following pre-trained models are supported and offering support for different pre-trained model like:

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Text extraction
Key-value extraction
Table extraction
Document classification
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) PDF

In your daily life, how many times you need to show your passport, your driver license, or your health insurance card to start a new request?

Some examples are:

Renting a car
Accessing the hospital to do triage
Medical checkup in healthcare
Hotel check-in
…

This is the reason why today Oracle can offer this added value in his Cloud offering… to simplify your daily activity, to make your life better.

A simple process, as I said before, can be that one about the “Car Rental”. Trying to imagine a human workflow behind, we can think about a BPMN process used to manage every step where for example an approval is required.

We can also imagine, not necessarily a process behind but simply the need to upload some info or data which need to be sent to other applications or database so that OPA can be used to easily configure a webpage from where it’s possible to upload data into an Oracle Database using its REST adapter or leveraging the DB adapter included in Oracle Integration Cloud Enterprise Edition (which includes OCI Process Automation).

I have tried to imagine a “Car Rental” process designing a step by step process for example when a long term rental is requested and its acceptance needs to be approved

As you can see below, when you design your WebForm from OCI OPA Console you can find on the right side, included in the activities section, the new icon about the AI Document Understanding.

This icon can be dragged & dropped into your canvas to model the web UI as you prefer and need.

It’s a pre-built integration, so you don’t need to think about REST invocation or similar. Everything is pre-configured for you and then you can easily use it without coding or similar stuff.

Once the process is implemented (here a quick overview how to do it), you can enable this one for production purposes

The operator can use the web UI to start a new request, clicking on the pre-defined process and/or including the new application in a web portal or into the Oracle SaaS springboard in according to the specific process.

Once the operator has identified the right process, clicking on the “Nuova Richiesta di Noleggio”, the webform appears to accept the required info.

If, AI Document understanding, has been properly configured, the end user can upload the image of the passport, or other provided documentation, so to start the automatic data acquisition

In a while, you can see how automatically all personal data appear on the right side of the page, filling the right field.

You can, of course, add other info to enrich the information required … something like below included. The web UI is highly customizable, and you can build your own web page as the business requires.

In this way, the desk operator can scan your documents and with a simple click, uploading the image, it’s possible to collect all the required information without huge effort taking advantage of:

Less time for data entry
Less errors for manual activities (i.e. reading passport and typing them)
Better and quicker customer experience

I encourage you to test it by yourself to personally understand how much it’s easy to do it. A very low effort to improve processes introducing in your business innovation, efficiency, and automation.

Helpful resources:

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/process-automation/

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/process-automation/user-process-automation/implement-intelligent-document-processing-forms.html#GUID-1C3EF754-8BAC-410E-B915-5A63F3EA786C

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/document-understanding/using/pretrained_doc_document_class.htm

https://blogs.oracle.com/integration/post/intelligent-document-processing-in-oci-process-automation

Process Automation helps you to rapidly design, automate, and manage business processes in the Cloud

Step-by-step guide discovering how to provision and build a business process with OCI Process Automation

OCI Process Automation (shortly OPA) is an OCI PaaS Oracle Managed cloud service which helps customers to build their business processes based on Structured or Unstructured models. This is the best solution to easily manage business processes granting to business users to build their own implementations without coding but just using a web browser and drag&drop capabilities… what we usually call a “no code” environment

The article has the goal to explain how, step by step, we can quickly test the features included in OPA… starting from my experience with the tool.

Just to simplify the explanation, I will describe a “happy path” process … in my example building one business process which usually is quite loved by everyone…. mainly when talking about the Vacation Request Approvals 🙂

Oracle Integration, OCI API Gateway and OCI Logging & Analytics

Integration, Control, Security and Monitoring

A real implementation often has different aspects which need to be addressed. Some of them are:

A tool to be used for building the integration among applications and technologies, possibly leveraging a low code environment
A tool to expose the APIs enabling the integration with third party applications applying in addition security policies, caching capabilities, routing, etc
A tool to monitor from IT Operation perspective the entire solution as just one application skipping the need to manage several silos or frameworks

Oracle Cloud can provide the right answer to your developer needs using the best Cloud native services and here identified by OCI API Gateway (API GTW), Oracle Integration (OIC) and OCI Logging and Analytics (LA)

If you are already using Oracle Integration for your development purposes probably you have already noticed the chance you have to configure the API Management solution that you prefer, exposing what you have already built.

From OIC console, you can access the “Setting” section and configure properly what you need

Clicking on the “API Management” link you can configure the connection to your OCI API Gateway instance

How and where can you find the required information?

Tenancy OCID can be found navigating the OCI Console and clicking on “Tenancy” details

Copy and paste this value on the previous screen into the Oracle Integration console

User OCID can be found from OCI Console under the link “My Profile”.

Also in this case, copy and paste the “OCID Id” into the Oracle Integration console

Finger Print: from OCI Console, after having selected “User Profile”, click on “API Keys” and from here you can add a new API Key

Download the “private key” than click “add”

A new key will appear among those eventually already generated previously

Private Key: this one, in pem format, comes from the activities previously done during the API Key creation. Before uploading the key in the API Management setting, you need to convert this one. The key that you have downloaded is in PKCS8 format and this one must be converted to RSA (PKCS1) before using it for the API Management connection, using the following command from your shell

openssl rsa -in private_key_in_pkcs8_format.pem -out new_converted_file.pem

Once converted the file, you can upload your new key to complete the configuration with your API Management connection.

Click “Save” and that’s all

Now from your Oracle Integration console, you can work with your integration flows and after having completed your implementation you are now ready to publish your asset to you OCI API Gateway instance. I’m using the “ECHO” integration flow as an example

Clicking on API Management you can publish the integration flow providing all the required information and details as below presented

selecting the Compartment where your OCI API Gateway is running and the right API GTW instance (for example that one for the TEST environment)

Clicking on the “Deploy” button and wait for few seconds before seeing your service exposed into you OCI API Gateway instance (in my case “MyAPIGateway”)

Clicking on the active gateway instance, you can access to the deployed APIs

as below shown

Clicking on your service, it’s possible to configure the policy you want to apply. In the case below shown, a “Rate Limiting” policy has been applied to control and filter the use of this service

So, jumping again into the previous webpage, where your REST service is detailed, you can copy the URL of the API endpoint to use it for invocation

Open your REST client (or simply a browser) to test your service

The invocation has been successfully tested.

Now, you can monitor the metrics from the OCI API Gateway console in the “Metrics” section to get more details about the behavior; you can select the right time interval to check and get visibility of the API execution

At the same time, you can also have a look at your Oracle Integration console to see how the calls have been managed by the integration platform and if needed you can submit again manually the requests in case of error if, of course, they are involving back-end systems which ahd some problems (networking issues, maintenance, …).

and getting further info about the execution and all details about the business message

In this case, I have used 2 different consoles to monitor OCI API Gateway and Oracle Integration respectevely.

Keep in mind that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can help you in case you want to consolidate in just one console several information coming from different and disparate OCI Services.

This is the right case for using OCI Logging & Analytics; it allows you to build your own dashboard collecting all info you need from IT Operations perspective and just if needed you can use the dedicated console of each service to leverage deeper and specific management capabilities (errors management, resubmitting faulted instances, changing scheduling parameters, modifying security policies, tuning caching options, etc).

How to use OCI Logging & Analytics?

Using OCI Console and clicking on “Observability and Management” as below described

and select “Logging Analytics” link

From here you can create your own dashboard to include all information you need. In my case I have built a dashboard (“My OCI Dashboard”) collecting info from OCI API Gateway, Oracle Integration and Logging & Analytics itself, as below described:

The screenshot upper represented, includes 6 different widgets which are collecting metrics from different sources so including in just one console all information you want about latency, inbound requests, bytes ingested, bytes sent, etc

How to create a Logging & Analytics dashboard?

Not really hard… on the contrary very straightforward procedure and you can get more details looking at the following blog post:

https://blogs.oracle.com/observability/post/monitor-and-optimize-performance-of-integrated-applications

This is a very simple implementation to show capabilities and synergies of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services and resources

Documentation:

OCI API Gateway

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/APIGateway/Concepts/apigatewayoverview.htm

https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/infographics/oci_apigw_gs_quickview/apigw_quickview_top/apigw_quickview/index.html

Oracle Integration

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/integration-cloud/integrations-user/managing-integration-api-oracle-api-gateway.html#GUID-7F82A91E-CA79-4053-94D8-7DF0BEB0438A

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/integration-cloud/rest-adapter/troubleshoot-rest-adapter.html#GUID-F6137806-4051-484A-810B-DA366B96D7C1

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/integration-cloud/index.html

OCI Logging & Analytics

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/logging-analytics/logqs/#before_you_begin

CI/CD working with EiPaaS Oracle Integration (OIC)

Everyone is aware of the continuous integration and continuous development relevance which is nowadays the mantra of DevOps practices.

Oracle Integration is obviously part of the end2end lifecycle development being involved for connecting legacy applications usually deployed on-premise and SaaS applications often provided by Oracle Cloud or hosted on other Cloud providers.

It doesn’t matter where the applications are, where the integration is; the continuous delivery of new integration processes and versions need to be included in a smart and automated tool able to reduce the gap between the different developer teams.

Developers, who have the ownership to build new services and IT Operators, who have the task of deploying new code versions to the different environments, need to converge on one single tool to simplify complex procedures that can be simply considered as two sides of the same coin.

The common need is to keep all environments aligned with the latest implementations, possibly having everything monitored and tracked to grant audit activities in terms of compliance; this is a must when the project is starting to become critical and relevant at the enterprise level.

Oracle Integration (OIC), as you know, includes Visual Builder Cloud Service which allows open-source standards-based integration to develop, collaborate on, and deploy applications within Oracle Cloud.

Just for this, it’s easy to use Visual Builder Studio, the built-in tool, that allows developers to manage the software life cycle automating the development.

Oracle VB Studio natively supports Oracle Integration artifacts, so we can leverage this one to easily promote our integration flows from an environment to another one moving for example our integration projects from development to test environment once you we completed the new implementation and of course ready to test it.

That’s the right path to be used for promoting projects from Test to Production or from Production to a DR environment, this one probably running on a different OCI Region.

Working with the current implementation you can:

Export integration flows
Import integration flows
Delete integration flows

As shown below in the picture, the options we have working with Oracle Visual Builder Studio and OIC

Herewith an example of pipeline that you can easily configure to automate the Export / Import procedure and defining in cascade all steps (“jobs”) to define the required actions, of course this one below just for demo purposes. This procedure will be later explained step-by-step just in case you want to reproduce this one for your own purposes

In order to export our assets from the development environment, for example, it’s enough to configure our source and target environments about the OIC instances

How to configure our OIC environments?

This is a straightforward operation working with VB Studio, as shown below:

We can create all connections we need to configure properly the tool

Once we have configured our instances, we need to build our “pipeline” so to automate the procedure when needed

Each pipeline can include all “jobs” we need (in the previous screenshot we have used two different jobs “select your OIC project” and “import OIC project”) so to build the right chain among the different available “jobs”

To create a job, select the Build link from the left panel of the Visual Builder studio and then we can create a new job

Each job has some options and parameters to be configured as below the screenshot shows:

Select the “Parameters” tab to configure the string parameter:

The “Default Value” is the value of the integration flow version on our OIC instance to be selected and moved to the new instance. Of course, this value can be changed when we run the build so to properly set the right integration flow version

Now it’s time to select the “Steps” tab to identify the OIC instance from where we want to export our integration flow

If needed, we can also include the asserter recording just flagging the box. In this case we are moving (exporting / importing) the integration flow named “ECHO” and working with its *.iar file once we have exported this one.

Now you can click the “After Build” tab to configure it as below described. The *.iar extension is the default extension of the integration flow when you decide to download it.

Click save and that’s all. Our first job is properly configured now.

To proceed we are now ready to configure the second job (“import OIC project”).

In this case, the first step to be accomplished is the configuration of the “Before Build” tab as below shown and adding a “Copy Artifacts” option

And now, as we did with the first job, we can properly configure the OIC instance target, in our sample, but in this case for the import action.

We can also check the box about the “activate integration” option so that our integration flow will be imported and started just to have this one ready to be invoked by applications

Also, in this case, we can now save our configuration.

Once these operations have been completed, we are ready to test our pipeline selecting the start button on the right side of the web page and below shown

If the execution of our “build” is properly configured, we can see the “green flag” of our jobs once we run it

Furthermore, we can drill down the execution to look at the log information just in case something wrong having also the chance to download the file including the log for further analysis or if we need to share this one with other people or applications.

From the Visual Builder Studio “Home page” we can also get information about statistics and previous executions so to track the activities managed on the different resources we have

This is for sure the best way to properly manage our environments and the best approach to have under control the lifecycle of our projects and their deployment.

For further information, look at the really interesting content already published here:

Oracle Blog

https://blogs.oracle.com/vbcs/post/cicd-for-oracle-integrations-with-visual-builder-studio

https://blogs.oracle.com/integration/post/cicd-implementation-for-oic

Oracle Documentation:

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/visual-builder/visualbuilder-manage-development-process/build-your-applications.html