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Explore the new features in App Connect Enterprise 12.0.6.0

By Ben Thompson posted Tue September 27, 2022 05:32 PM

  
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We aim to provide regular quarterly mod releases for ACE 12, which contain both new features and regular maintenance:

  • IBM App Connect Enterprise 12.0.1.0 was released in May 2021.
  • IBM App Connect Enterprise 12.0.2.0 was released in September 2021 - more information here
  • IBM App Connect Enterprise 12.0.3.0 was released in December 2021 - more information here
  • IBM App Connect Enterprise 12.0.4.0 was released in March 2022 - more information here
  • IBM App Connect Enterprise 12.0.5.0 was released in June 2022 - more information here
  • IBM App Connect Enterprise 12.0.6.0 was released in September 2022 - more information below.

This blog post summarizes all the latest and greatest capabilities which were made available in IBM App Connect Enterprise 12.0.6.0:

  • New Discovery Connector message flow nodes:
    • Oracle EBS Request node
    • SAP OData Request node
    • ServiceNow Request node
    • Slack Request node
    • Salesforce Input node
    • ServiceNow Input node
  • Toolkit YAML Editor
  • Transformation Advisor reporting with a configurable target of ACE Containers, ACEv12 Software or ACEv11 Software
  • Web UI Enhancements
    • New View as a table option for the contents of an integration server
    • One-click Table column ordering based on Name and Type
    • New View as a table option for the contents of a Policy project
  • File Exists message flow node - New settings for List Mode and FTP
  • New File Iterator message flow node
  • 11 New Product Tutorials
  • Removal of restrictions when visually debugging flows deployed as .cmf

Read the sections below to find out more!

New Discovery Connector message flow nodes

At the end of June, the last mod release of the ACE product (12.0.5.0) introduced a new style of message flow node known as Discovery Connector message flow nodes. As their name suggests, this new class of node provides an easy guided experience in the development Toolkit for connecting to 3rd party online applications and gathering the required configuration which is needed to integrate with them. In App Connect Enterprise 12.0.6.0 we have extended this area of the product with a further six Discovery Connector message flow nodes: Oracle EBS Request, SAP OData Request, ServiceNow Request, Slack Request, Salesforce Input and ServiceNow Input.


The File > New > Discovery Connector policies and credentials menu of the Toolkit launches the Connector Discovery process which lets you identify the application which you would like to integrate with and specify connection information:


You can expand the application sections to find out more about the available actions and data objects, and filter the list too:


You can also drag and drop Discovery Connector nodes from the palette on to the message flow canvas. Each message flow node has a button to Launch Connector Discovery. Once you have gone through the discovery process, the results are saved back into the Toolkit workspace as:

  • Properties of the node in the message flow file
  • Properties in a corresponding policy file (linked from the message flow node)
  • Credentials saved into an ACE vault
Here's an example of an Oracle E-Business Suite Request node where the discovery process has been completed for the Get order action. With App Connect Enterprise 12.0.6.0, the message flow node properties now include buttons to help easily locate and open the request and response JSON schemas for the node:


If you'd like some help trying out the Discovery Connector nodes for the first time, then check out the new tutorials which have been added to the Toolkit Tutorial Gallery (in the Toolkit go to the menu Help > Tutorials Gallery).

Toolkit YAML Editor

As the ACE product evolves, we see increasing value in using user-friendly YAML structures for key pieces of product configuration, such as the server.configuration.yaml file, which defines many properties of an integration server.  An independent integration server can be easily created from within the Toolkit for localised testing and development purposes, and on occasion you might want to edit its yaml file to introduce new behaviours for the server. To assist with this process, in App Connect Enterprise 12.0.6.0 the Toolkit provides a new YAML editor plugin which is installed and available by default out of the box. The editor provides separate syntax colouring for Yaml keywords, Booleans, Double quoted strings, Quoted strings, Comments, and Mappings.


From the Window > Preferences menu you can also configure your desired settings for the Yaml Editor - for example to control line lengths and indentations:

Transformation Advisor reporting with a configurable target of ACE Containers, ACEv12 Software or ACEv11 Software

If you are planning to move to a containerized environment, the Transformation Advisor tool (which is provided with all installations of App Connect Enterprise), helps you to analyze your on-premises workloads for modernization. You can collect and assess data for a whole integration node or a specific integration server in an integration node backup zip file, using the TADataCollector command. The tool generates a static web page with the results of the analysis.

In App Connect Enterprise 12.0.6.0, the TADataCollector command has been extended to include a --target parameter, which you can use to specify the target of the analysis which is to be run by the Transformation Advisor tool. As a result of setting this parameter, the advice given by the Transformation Advisor tool is focused on the specified target, which can be one of ACE Containers, ACEv11 Software, or ACEv12 Software. By default, the specified target is ACE Containers.  Using this new option allows the advice provided in the generated report to be better directed for the use case you have in mind.  For example, some users may want to use the tool to better understand differences between the software versions for an on-premises deployment, where as other users may be considering a wider move to deploy the ACE technology in a container based architecture or perhaps include other product capabilities available with the Cloud Pak for Integration.

Consider the following two examples of running the new command option; one which uses a target of ACEv12 Software and the other a target of ACE Containers.  You will see that even though both runs of the Transformation Advisor tool were directed against the same IIBv10 backup zip file, the HTML reports which are generated have different numbers of issues listed in each example.

Using a --target of ACEv12 Software



Using a --target of ACE Containers

Web UI Enhancements

As part of our on-going strategy for making the App Connect Enterprise product easier to use for both developers and administrators, we have further enhanced the administrative Web UI with some new views and layout options:

New View as a table option for the contents of an integration server

By default the Web UI utilises a tile-based theme when displaying the deployed contents of an integration server. This approach is reflected in all of the on-premise software product's default views and reflects the same styling which is used by our public cloud platform and our App Connect Enterprise Certified Container dashboard. 



There are occasions, particularly when dealing with large numbers of deployed artifacts, where users would prefer to take better advantage of their screen real estate and see more detail on a single screen. For these situations, App Connect Enterprise 12.0.6.0 adds a new button to change the tile layout to instead View as a table (shown with hover help in the top right corner of the above screenshot).  When selected the display will revert to a tabular layout as shown below:

One-click Table column ordering based on Name and Type

The table content will initially be ordered alphabetically based on Name. You can click on the column headings of Name in order to reverse the sort order, and clicking on the Type column will sort by artifact type as well:

New View as a table option for the contents of a Policy project

The new tabulated views may be especially helpful when trying to determine the different types of policy ("normal" policies with a .policyxml extention, monitoring profiles, policy sets and policy set bindings), which can be deployed in a Policy Project:

File Exists message flow node - new capabilities for FTP and List Mode

The FileExists node has been further enhanced in App Connect Enterprise 12.0.6.0 with a new List mode property. Prior to this enhancement, the message flow node would only process a single file at a time.  The input directory would be scanned for the next file, and then information about that one file would be propagated downstream to the rest of the message flow.  Now, if the new List mode property is ticked, then information about multiple files will be sent downstream as part of the LocalEnvironment of a single message flow propagation.  For example, consider a very basic message flow which does nothing more than propagate information about the discovered files to a downstream trace node:

If there are three available files in the input directory C:\temp\FileIterator\Input then the trace file generated by the Trace node will contain information about all three files as shown below:

This mod release also incorporates a new FTP properties panel which configures the node for polling of remote files. The configuration options should be very familiar to users of the other File nodes such as FileInput, FileOutput and FileRead:

For detailed documentation of these new settings, and all other properties of the FileExists node, check out the documentation here.

New File Iterator message flow node

As discussed above, starting from App Connect Enterprise 12.0.6.0, the FileExists node can run in a List mode and propagate information about multiple files downstream, all within the LocalEnvironment tree of a single propagation down the message flow.  The purpose of the File Iterator node is to have an easy method of interacting with this LocalEnvironment structure without the flow developer needing to write any looping logic. The FileIterator node processes the list of files and for each entry in the list, propagates a LocalEnvironment that is compatible with driving the behaviour of a subsequent FileRead node to read and parse that specific file. The FileIterator node allows each file to be processed one at a time. If an exception occurs for a particular propagation, the exception is stored, and the remaining file entries are processed to completion.  Consider an example message flow that looks like this:


Consider the same three input files which we discussed earlier in this article, and which have different Last Modified timestamps:
  • ThisIsATextFileWhichWontBeParsed.txt has a Last Modified timestamp of 2022-09-27 15:55:13.413
  • ThisFileHasATotallyDifferentName.txt has a Last Modified timestamp of 2022-09-08 08:30:29.416
  • ThisIsAThirdFile.txt has a Last Modified timestamp of 2022-09-08 08:30:47.544

Courtesy of the File Iterator node, the metadata about each of these files is passed down the message flow to the Filter node whose ESQL logic is shown below:


This logic compares the date portion of the Last Modified timestamp to the current date (it is the 27th September as this blog is being written):

  • If the Last Modified date came before today, the propagation is sent to the node named Trace2
  • Otherwise the propagation is sent to the FileRead node

This simple example demonstrates the concept that the combination of the File Exists node and the File Iterator node has produced a message flow pattern where we only need to utilise the FileRead node in circumstances where we genuinely want to spend our valuable compute resource on reading and parsing the data from disk.

To understand more about the details of this example, or to try it out for yourself, check out the Tutorials Gallery in the ACE Toolkit.

11 New Product Tutorials

As usual, we have published tutorials into the Toolkit Tutorials Gallery for all the new features of the release:

  • Discovery Connector - Using the Oracle E-Business Suite Request node
  • Discovery Connector - Using the SAP OData Request node
  • Discovery Connector - Using the Slack Request node
  • Discovery Connector - Using the ServiceNow Request node
  • Discovery Connector - Using the ServiceNow Input node
  • Discovery Connector - Using the Salesforce Input node
  • File - Using the FileExists node and the FileIterator node together in a message flow
  • App Connect for Manufacturing - Using the OPC-UA-Read node to read data from an OPC Server
  • App Connect for Manufacturing - Using the OPC-UA-Input node to read subscribed data from an OPC Server
  • App Connect for Manufacturing - Using the OPC-UA-Write node to write data into an OPC Server
  • App Connect for Manufacturing - Using the OPC-UA-Method-Call node to call a method on an OPC Server


Of particular note, you will find some new tutorials which are dedicated to the message flow nodes belonging to the App Connect for Manufacturing product (App Connect for Manufacturing 3.0.1.0 installs on top of App Connect Enterprise 12.0.4.0 or above):

Removal of restrictions when visually debugging flows deployed as .cmf

For many years now, we have been encouraging users to deploy artifacts to the product's runtime using BAR files which carry message flows in source format (ie the message flows inside the BAR have a .msgflow extension). This is the default option (and has been for a long time now) for all new BAR files which are created with the product. That said, some users may still be taking advantage of older settings which involve selecting the BAR file option to Compile and in-line resources, or using very old BAR files from earlier versions of the product. In these situations, we document a few restrictions which apply:

If you select Compile and in-line resources in the BAR File editor, a .cmf file is added to the BAR file for each message flow. This file is a compiled version of the message flow. The following limitations apply when you are testing compiled message flows:

  • You cannot use the Flow Exerciser with compiled message flows.
  • The flow diagram that is shown in the web user interface does not match how the flow is shown in the IBM® App Connect Enterprise Toolkit.
  • Monitoring events and statistics records do not match the points in the original flow diagram.

This release of App Connect Enterprise 12.0.6.0 has removed the restriction that previously applied which limited support for setting debugger breakpoints on connections in compiled message flows.

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