With the Oracle Integration Cloud, when you have to call a service from a Process you can choose to call an external service directly or you can put an Integration in between. This article gives some directives why you may want to do the latter, and how to prevent a pitfall that is easy to step in to.
To call a service you have to import the WSDL with it's XSD's. With that Business Types are auto-generated for all complexTypes in that XSD. Recently I was refactoring a case where this resulted in some 220 (!) Business Types being generated from 1 single external service, of which only a few were actually used. Granted, it concerned a service with a very complex interface, but for some reason all the external SOAP services we have to consume are moderate to very complex and easily generate 50+ Business Types. Not only that, they also use relatively long namespaces. Can you imagine what will happen when you have to call 5 of these services from the same Process application! You barely can see the forest from the trees, and you may find it pretty difficult to identify the correct Business Type to use for your request.
The following example shows the selection list showing the types to chose from when creating a data object for one of the most simple cases we have.
Another issue might be that your Process is tightly coupled to the external service. When it's interface changes you will have to re-import the WSDL. There is a risk that it will not be back-ward compatible which may result in a situation that you first have to completely remove the existing WSDL with all its resources, but can't do so until you have to removed all references to it from data objects (variables) that were defined using those Business Types. That can become quite a challenge.
All this can to a great length be prevented by creating an Integration as a proxy between the external service and the Process application. But you will solve nothing when you use the same WSDL for both the Invoke as well as the Trigger Connection. You must take the extra step to create another WSDL with an XSD for the trigger connection, which offers an as much simplified interface as possible to be consumed by the process. This is nothing less than an example of applying the basic principle of decoupling.
What I personally do is, starting from the parent element of the request and response type, copying the complex types I need from the XSD of the target service, snip all elements I don't need from it, simplify the data types (e.g. change normalizedString to string) and remove all attributes I don't need, or replace those that I do by an element instead. And so work my way down to the child elements as far as required. And then create a Trigger Connection based on the simplified WSDL to be used for the Integration that will be consumed by the Process, as shown in the following picture.
In the example of the 220 Business Types I mentioned before, I was able to reduce that to just 22 Business Types.
The following example shows the selection list showing the types to chose from when creating a data object for one of the most simple cases we have.
Another issue might be that your Process is tightly coupled to the external service. When it's interface changes you will have to re-import the WSDL. There is a risk that it will not be back-ward compatible which may result in a situation that you first have to completely remove the existing WSDL with all its resources, but can't do so until you have to removed all references to it from data objects (variables) that were defined using those Business Types. That can become quite a challenge.
All this can to a great length be prevented by creating an Integration as a proxy between the external service and the Process application. But you will solve nothing when you use the same WSDL for both the Invoke as well as the Trigger Connection. You must take the extra step to create another WSDL with an XSD for the trigger connection, which offers an as much simplified interface as possible to be consumed by the process. This is nothing less than an example of applying the basic principle of decoupling.
What I personally do is, starting from the parent element of the request and response type, copying the complex types I need from the XSD of the target service, snip all elements I don't need from it, simplify the data types (e.g. change normalizedString to string) and remove all attributes I don't need, or replace those that I do by an element instead. And so work my way down to the child elements as far as required. And then create a Trigger Connection based on the simplified WSDL to be used for the Integration that will be consumed by the Process, as shown in the following picture.
In the example of the 220 Business Types I mentioned before, I was able to reduce that to just 22 Business Types.
