I have recently had to investigate integrating BizTalk 2006 R2 to JD Edwards version 8.12 (latest version). My first thought was to use the BizTalk JDE Adapter. I enquired about it on the BizTalk MSDN forums and also on a mailing list we have between our Auckland Connected Systems User Group and the Sydney and Brisbane BizTalk user groups. No responses.
I reviewed the BizTalk JD Edwards Adapter documentation. I reviewed the 376 pages of Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools Interoperability Guide. I also checked out the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Business Services Data Sheet and the Extending with Service Oriented Architecture White Paper.
After all this, the solution was quite simple: nowadays JD Edwards EnterpriseOne offers native support of Web Services. You still need a JD Edwards developer to expose them, but this means there is no need to install the java components and go through the long list of steps to get the JD Edwards Adapter installed and working correctly on the BizTalk Server. It’s much nicer and cleaner to have Web Services exposed directly from the JD Edwards server. It is also beneficial to the company because other systems can call the same Web Service, especially if they are looking at an SOA approach.
This is probably the reason why Microsoft didn’t release a JD Edwards adapter with the latest WCF based Adapter Pack.
I will post back here or update this post when I get more information on how much is involved to expose JD Edwards objects via Web Services.
For the Windows platform, JDE has an MSMQ adapter that works really well if your integration scenarios don’t include messages over 4MB – actually, inbound messages will need to be smaller than 4MB because of the way the the response document is populated with additional values (all the parameters that are passed into a function, are returned in the xml so it can be accessed by functions further down in the call stack leading to additional message bloat).
It will still require sending messages to JDE in an XML RPC format, where the ‘Sales Order’ message is actually a method call to the JDE functions:
BeginDoc
EditLine (for each sales order line)
End Doc
Miscellaneous functions depending on business requirements.
I actually like that queuing layer in front of JDE and the middle tier, though I would very much like to understand how to publish those web services directly from JDE.
Because of the 4MB barrier with MSMQ, we had to find an alternative method for integrating with JDE – one that worked with XE and 8.11. We still put the web service facade in front of JDE, but we also used their xmlinterop.dll with a pinvoke to jdeRequest. This allows BizTalk to use a native adapter for the integration. We were fortunate to have a consultant with us how knows more about JDE integration than even JDE/Oracle internal resources + plus he’s pretty handy with BizTalk! ;P
Looking forward to what you find on JDE web services!
Thanks,
Z
Ah, missed the link to the MSDN forum post. What I described above is leveraging “Xml Call Object” to invoke functions in JDE, sounds like you’ve already got a similar scenario.
I believe I also made the assumption that JDE is running on Windows, so MSMQ would be available, because…well…isn’t everybody?? 🙂
I’d also be very interested if the existing schemas that are being used (jdeRequest) can be leveraged with the web services. That would be our biggest hurdle in moving to a different adapter – unless we could automate the transformation from the existing schemas to whatever was required by the new adapter.
Thanks again!
Z
Hi Zach,
Thank you very much for your comments, I’ll certainly keep in mind the MSMQ option. I’ll also investigate the differences between the jdeRequest schemas and the the web services schemas.
Regards,
Thiago
Thanks for the post. It confirmed what I am trying to do to resove current performance related issues around our BizTalk 2006, 2009 solutions using JDE Adapter: Use the web services instead. Not only is the old “JDE Adapter dead”, I can attest that it does not perform well well in scenarios with large messages in a high availability, high transaction environment.
hi, could you tell how can I expose JDE business service as a web service and access it using biztalk 2010
thanks