OIC: Integration Pick action full-circle now with Process using it!

This article describes how the Pick feature aka Multi-Operation Support for REST integrations now also is fully supported by Process applications.

More than a year ago the Pick action was introduced in OIC also known as Multi-Operation Support. Since then you can create REST integrations supporting multiple actions for one resource using one single URL. For example, you can have one single endpoint like .../ic/api/integration/v1/flows/rest/INT_GN_CASE_GROUPS/2.0/case-metadata/casegroups supporting a POST, GET, PUT and DELETE. 

 

Apart from the fact that it is the de-facto standard for developing REST services to handle one single resource, it also is more convenient to have one single Integration that you can activate or deactivate instead of creating as many integrations as there are actions.

Until the August 2020 release it was not yet supported by Process, but finally it is!!

Now why would you want this? In short: because is easier and it performs better.

It is easier because:

• You don't have to copy & paste the endpoint of the Integration to use it. You can just point to it when creating the Connector.
• Instead of configuring and testing all the different operations (as you had to do with External Service), it now suffices to configure one singe Connector and then just chose the action to use.
• You don't need to configuring security, run-time it will use the already established JWT token to authenticate.
• Because it uses a tokenized endpoint, you don't have to change one when promoting the process to a next environment.
  

Configuring operations with External Service

 

Point and click with Use Integration

 

It performs better, because:

• "Use Integration" in Process is comparable to the "Local Integration" action in Integration. This means that OIC "knows" that the service is colocated with the process, implying that a direct (RMI) call is done instead of going through the overhead of using the HTTP stack (via the Load Balancer and all, but still within Oracle's data center).

Because of all this, I would recommend not only to use this from now on, but also refactor all existing Connectors you may already have created in the past.