Use WebService to integrate with Oracle EBS (on)

I. Overview

Oracleebs is an Oracle ERP product. This product is very large and can provide powerful management functions for all aspects of the enterprise. Generally, some of its modules are used by large enterprises, depending on the nature of the company, the selected modules will also be different. For production enterprises, the purchased modules include product and price management modules.

ERP is a large system and can select Oracle ERP enterprises, the scale is generally not too small, so in terms of it, in addition to the ERP product itself, there are also some other small proprietary business systems to support. Some of these systems have been used before ERP went online, and cannot simply replace them with all ERP products. According to the actual situation, it is necessary to synchronize some information between each system and EBS, especially product information, which will be maintained in the ERP system, other systems can directly reference the information in the ERP system, so that there is only one set of product information, no redundancy or ambiguity.

Our company used a lot of methods to interface ERP in the past. The most common one is to directly read information from ERP and then directly write it into the business system, or the business system can directly write information to ERP. For simple information, this practice can basically work, but for more complex business logic, the risk of this practice cannot be underestimated, because according to the experience of using EBS, the Design of EBS is very complicated, and the table structure and application relationship are also complicated. Sometimes it is enough to modify a table, but when it is actually used, or after a while, it is discovered that the data consistency of ERP has been damaged, sometimes it may even cause problems in the ERP system, and sometimes it is difficult to restore, so this approach is not desirable.

EBS itself provides a series of interface tables. Therefore, during data writing to EBS, Oracle recommends using interface tables. After temporary data is written to the interface table, the oracleebs product has corresponding interfaces.ProgramTo achieve the description of the docking table and import the production table, so as to maintain the data integrity of EBS as much as possible. Of course, in essence, we still operate on database tables, but this approach is much safer.

Generally, the application system and ERP system are both in the same network segment of the company. In this case, it is possible to use database connection for integration, however, when some application systems are located in different geographic locations or even overseas, this method is far from enough, because requests initiated from other data centers cannot directly reach the ERP Database.

In fact, the integration requirements of many systems are abstracted out, which has a great similarity. However, if each vendor makes its own standards, it may have a great impact on EBS. In this case, you can consider standardizing the EBS interface.

When standardizing the EBS interface, several issues need to be considered

Ø Data Security

The interface can only open the part required by the relevant system, and cannot open more business data;

The application system can only perform Interface Verification by legal means. Unauthorized systems cannot use this interface.

Ø Data Consistency

The structure of the EBS system is quite complex. When writing data, you must pay attention to data integrity and consistency. If multiple tables are redundant in the system, make sure to process all related tables at the same time. If the table to be processed is incomplete, it will cause an EBS fatal error. To achieve this consistency, we should try to use the EBS interface table system, and then use the standard requests of EBs to process the subsequent work.

System versatility

This interface system needs to consider the universal support for several systems that need to be connected at present, that is, this interface system should be unrelated to the business system as far as possible, supports different systems through simple configuration;

Another factor that needs to be considered is the access to the EBS third-party systems. Some are located at the enterprise headquarters and can be directly connected to the EBS database server. Some systems are located overseas and cannot be directly connected to the EBS database, to achieve this universality, we should consider using WebService for processing, that is, releasing a public WebService to connect it to the EBS database, in this way, you can connect systems in different geographic locations.

In the next section, we will discuss the architecture for integration.

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