Hi Guys,
this is more of a technology-architectur-philosophy type of post but is based on real-world scenarious.
I would appreciate very much your insights as a supportive community.
In some organizations I visit (mostly technology oriented ones) the Integration concepts of ESB and SAP PI are found
somewhat strange to the managment and development teams.
As SAP PI and SOA concepts are "cast in concrete" facts, and are well knowen to us - integration consultants,
It allways seems like the avalaible Integration patterns + SAP PI Framwork dont "deliver the goods" the customer wants.
It dosnt matter , how many times the patterns and SAP PI fram,work solutions are pitched,
its allways drawen back to the old "taylor made" solutions that some developemnt manager is familair with since the 80's.
In such cases , the SAP PI offcourse -lacks and fails to deliver.
A subject in monitoring solution example :
An inbound FTP file to IDoc Scenrio. basic!.
Our monitoring solution is :
on the Techincal monitoring level
Partner -> FTP. - monitoring responsiability of the partner placing the FTP call communciation monitoring on the FTP protocol level .
FTP -> IDoc. - SAP PI technical monitoring responsiability. - Validation,mapping,routing,Quality of service,call adapter,ALEAUDIT (if needed)
now,
some IT organizations demands for a message back to be send by SAP PI to the partner during failure in each one of the processing steps mentioned above instead of referring them as internal technical issues aimed for the SAP PI 1st level supprt or development team.
in some steps ,like validation, SAP PI can support a Send-back validation error message out-of-the-box by the AE.
but again, this according to documentation relevant for sync. scenarios based on SOAP or 2 async scenrious for Industry standards like CIDEX and RNIF.
another supporitng process is inbound EDIs like EDIFACT and X12 the in some tools can provide a 997.
Open quesitons are :
1.as we are dealing with an inbound flat file how can a message back to the partner can be generated during validation ?
2.is it a good practice at all in an inbound file scenario?
3.if validations failed, what data can be provided in the send-back message as it failed validation...
these quesitons are also relevant for error message back during mapping,routing,queue stuck etc.
If you got till this point, I assume you experiance similar issues in your projects. what is your stand\opinion\insights?