Intelligent Advisor and Siebel 21 #2

Serendipitously, this week has seen the office filled with Siebel 21 and Intelligent Advisor technical discussions and installations. So the time is right to continue on from the post a few weeks ago. So let’s reset the clock and start our process again:

The Siebel environment is using Siebel 21.1 and Intelligent Advisor 20D Monthly update 2 and the White Paper from Oracle, thanks to Phil Whitwell. Here are the steps executed / the hoops jumped. For the record, this environment was a clean Siebel that has been updated at every release since 19.6, and it had some vestiges of the old integrations in the Repository. Intelligent Advisor was installed fresh for 20D. Each application had it’s own database (19c). WebLogic was setup with HTTP and HTTPS for the Hub.

Siebel Tools

So we began by renaming to “_old” all the integration objects from the original repository that belonged to the original project (so this meant we renamed load-request, load-response and all the others that apply to the Siebel Connector (get-metadata-request and response , check-alive-request and response and so on).

We proceeded to import the latest WSDL version from the Intelligent Advisor Hub (it’s 12.2.18 for the Connector framework) and this gave us a new, up to date set of integration objects. We also imported the latest Interview Service WSDL for completeness sake.

Things to remember:

  • Always remove all the xsd:annotation and wsdl:documentation tags before you begin. You can either remove them or just comment them out. There are many that are over the Siebel Tools 256 character limit. Use Notepad++ and some regular expression searches to get them all, about 230 in total.
  • The imports will take a long time. We had a machine with 64Gb of RAM and nothing but Siebel Tools for this, and it still took several attemps (out of memory errors, crashes). Be prepared to wait. The workspace will be stuck in “Submitted for Delivery” so you can try again.

Now you can check that the Check Alive and Get Metadata workflows are in the Repository (they are). But we had to make a dummy edit on them and re-deliver to get them to really show up in Workflow Monitoring. This meant that the work to build the Inbound Web Service can begin.

SOAP UI CheckAlive

We got several errors in respect of “missing” integration objects – they were deployed to runtime, the cache was cleared, they were delivered – we bounced the object manager but in one case only a full server restart did the trick.

There will be errors when trying to deploy the Web Service, due to mismatched API namespaces in the User Properties of the response Integration Objects. This will be the case for most of them, so you can fix that now.

XSD errors

Edit them so they both (XSDType and XMLTag) read “http://xmlns.oracle.com/policyautomation/hub/12.2.18/metadata/types” and try again.

Solving he XSD Errors

By now you should have CheckAlive and Getmetadata responding in Soap UI or your testing tool of choice. You can also add the connection to the Intelligent Advisor Hub – set the version to 12.2.18 along with the usual settings for the SOAP action pattern and username and password. Don’t forget any certificates you might need to keep the two applications talking properly.

Connection Intelligent Advisor and Siebel 21 in the Hub

Recall also that in Siebel these days, the format of the URL to access the eai_anon (or, indeed, any other object manager URL) has changed with “/” in place of “_” and no “start.swe”. So be careful of these minor snags.

You might find that the Getmetadata response is not read properly by Oracle Policy Modeling. This is probably because on the Siebel Server, the XSLT that handles the response (GetMetaDataResp.xsl) is missing the “accepts-attachments” attribute when it builds the <table> tag. Add it in manually to the XSLT and try again. By now Getmetadata should work just fine.

Missing XSLT

Next on the list is the Load operation. So we went ahead and imported the load example from the original White Paper Zip file. The import did not go very well. We noticed that many output arguments had been changed to “Literal” and in some cases they disappeared altogether. So we spent a fun hour or two debugging and fixing all of that.

Check your Arguments

We also noticed that some Process Properties were reset to “In/Out” as opposed to “None” which of course gave us random tags in the responses. Using SOAP-UI and pasting our getmetadata-response into a Static Connection gave us a sign that there was an issue because it was immediately rejected.

Don’t forget to edit the path names (“C:\temp\XXX.xml”) and set the EAI Folder List parameter on the Siebel Server so that you can actually save the suggested dump files created during the execution of the Workflow Process.

Intelligent Advisor and Siebel 21 - watch out for file paths that aren't correct.

After all of that, if you are still with us, you should have a Load that actually, well, loads something!

Intelligent Advisor and Siebel 21  - Smoke Test

More in the next part. In the meantime, here are some other posts on similar topics that you might enjoy:

Author: Richard Napier

After 8 years in case management and ERP software roles, Richard Napier joined Siebel Systems in 1999 and took up the role of managing the nascent Siebel University in Southern Europe. He subsequently was Director of Business Development and Education for InFact Group (now part of Business & Decisions) for 8 years. He now runs Intelligent Advisor IT Consulting OÜ. Owner of intelligent-advisor.com, he also is Co-Founder of the Siebel Hub.

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