Connecting Applications to Implement Business Processes Using Tools and Technologies to Perform Message Transformations

23 Working with Message Transformations 23-1 23 Working with Message Transformations This chapter describes how to create transformation maps, work with domain value maps DVMs and cross-references, and populate Enterprise Business Message EBM headers. This chapter includes the following sections: ■ Section 23.1, Introduction to Transformation Maps ■ Section 23.2, Creating Transformation Maps ■ Section 23.3, Making Transformation Maps Extension Aware ■ Section 23.4, Working with DVMs and Cross-References ■ Section 23.5, Mapping and Populating the Identification Type ■ Section 23.6, Introducing EBM Header Concepts

23.1 Introduction to Transformation Maps

Use transformation maps when the document expected by a source or target application varies from the document generated by a source or target application in terms of data shape and semantics. Transformation maps resolve these structural and semantic differences.

23.1.1 Connecting Applications to Implement Business Processes

Oracle Application Integration Architecture AIA leverages canonical patterns and direct patterns to connect applications for implementing business processes.

23.1.1.1 Canonical Patterns

AIA introduces a set of generic data structures called Enterprise Business Objects EBOs. An EBO represents a common object definition for business concepts such as Account, Sales Order, Item and so on. The business integration processes work only on messages that are either a complete EBO or a subset of an EBO. This approach allows the cross-industry application processes to be independent of participating applications. EBOs contain components that satisfy the requirements of business objects from the target application data models. Transformations map the application business-specific message to the EBM which is AIA canonical data model. Figure 23–1 illustrates how a canonical pattern is implemented in AIA. 23-2 Developers Guide for Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack Figure 23–1 Canonical Pattern Implemented in AIA

23.1.1.2 When to Use Direct Integrations

When data integration involves either a large batch of records, or very large data, you can choose to implement a direct integration specializing on the movement of data with high performance with a trade-off of reusability. Direct integrations can encompass bulk processing and trickle feeds which focus only on implementation decoupling and not data decoupling. For bulk processing, the ETL tool is used and transformations are done at the data layer using the tool. Although application agnostic objects are not used in trickle feed implementations, the requester application still must transform the content that is produced into the data shape expected by the provider application. For more information, see Chapter 22, Using Oracle Data Integrator for Bulk Processing.

23.1.2 Using Tools and Technologies to Perform Message Transformations

AIA recommends the use of XSLT vocabulary for constructing the transformation maps. The XSLT Mapper in JDeveloper enables you to create data transformations between source schema elements and target schema elements within the context of services developed using either Oracle BPEL Process Manager or Oracle Mediator. You use the XSLT Mapper transformation tool to create the contents of a map file. Figure 23–2 shows the layout of the XSLT Mapper. Working with Message Transformations 23-3 Figure 23–2 Layout of the XSLT Mapper For more information about the XSLT Mapper, see Creating Transformations with the XSLT Mapper in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Developers Guide for Oracle SOA Suite.

23.2 Creating Transformation Maps