Tips & Tricks that'll save you a lot of time regarding ODI, Flex, Soa Suite

Latelly I've been spending a lot of time regarding deployment and configuration of Adobe Flex applications integrated with Bpel on an OC4J-container.

On the other hand I've been experimenting a lot with ODI and how the tool will handle changing data models, changing datasources, ...

Lastly I've been playing around with invocation of Bpel Processes using Web Service Proxy Clients instead of the Bpel Invocation API.

The question that's still unanswered because no documentation or benchmarks or best practices are available yet is: 'What's the best practice in invoking bpel processes, the Bpel Invocation API or Web Service Proxy Clients?'

Tips & Tricks ODI:

• Interesting Notes: 423740.1, 423817.1
• Grant dba-privileges to your source-db-user, otherwise you'll get 'insufficient privileges' exceptions when trying to execute your interfaces

Handling changing data models (new tables, deletion of existing attributes in tables, addition of new attributes, additional relationships, ... ) :

• Go to your datamodel and reverse engineer the changed tables again. New attributes are added, deleted attributes aren't removed yet because they're referenced in interfaces in your ODI Designer.
• Go to your interfaces defined in the Designer-tab in ODI: remove all active mappings to the attributes that were deleted
• Go back to the model-tab in designer and right-click the attribute in your tabel and choose delete. When all references are updated correctly (no active mapping), the attribute will be deleted from your datamodel

Tips & Tricks Flex:

• When you're getting weard errors regarding 'conversion exception between java.util.Date and java.util.Calendar' or exceptions regarding producer or consumer-errors => make sure you've defined 'autocommit'-property to false on your data services (Using LCDS)
• How to handle static data without usage of Value Object or Data Transfer Objects => use SQLAssembler without usage of java-classes or actionscript-classes in your data-management-config.
• rtmp-host connection failure on OC4J => try to reset the connection-port to another value than the default one which is '2038'. I've defined the value to '2035' and now no errors are thrown anymore
• Use [managed] attribute to make sure all changes on objects are synced between 2 clients
• Deploying data-management-config to different JEE Servers, e.g. Tomcat and OC4J. When you deploy to tomcat you have to define the full JNDI-location which would be for example: java:/comp/env/jdbc/flexDS. When you deploy to an OC4J, you need to define the short JNDI-descriptor: jdbc/flexDS.

The other exceptions, weard behaviour was already addressed in earlier posts:

• You need to add an xsl-choose-when-otherwise xsl-node structure to you transform-activity in your bpel-process and in the otherwise-tag define the xsi:nil=true on your attribute to make sure the web service proxy won't set this attribute to required.
• You need to update the toplink-mapping file being generated in bpel when using the database adapter. Relationships aren't defined properly, because the method accessor is checked for all one-to-many relationships whilst these aren't defined in the java wrapper classes. Uncheck these 'map to method accessors' and these exceptions will disappear. You can uncheck these when drilling down in your toplink.mwp file into to your object on your mappedCollections.

A beautiful one were all newbees in SOA Suite spend ages and ages to figure out what the problem is ... Oracle please fix this ???

You've installed SOA Suite (you can choose which version) and entered a custom password during installation for your oc4jadmin-password, not the 'welcome1' password. You can choose your own password wright ?

But when the newbee starts creating his first bpel and esb projects, there are weard errors poping up: 'connection timed out', 'jndi-location for db-adapter isn't properly defined', ...

Well, weard but true, the 'welcome1' password is defined hardcoded in different 'oc4j-ra.xml' files used in the jmsadapter-folder, dbadapter-folder, ... Make sure to change the passwords correctly when you're drilling through the different Oracle By Example-exercices or tutorials.