Intelligent Advisor and Siebel 21
This is the introductory article to this series – Note : If you are looking to go straight to the deep-dive series of tutorials : they start in part two here.
The world of Siebel CRM is evolving so fast (one might even say it has become so agile that some struggle to keep up) that I come regularly across customers of Oracle Intelligent Advisor who have integrated with Siebel 15 or 16, and who now are scratching their heads in respect of integration with Siebel 21 “new generation”. So what about the integration of Intelligent Advisor and Siebel 21?
I thought it might be useful therefore to both outline my own experiences and also bust some of the myths around this and other integrations. As this blog is dedicated to Intelligent Advisor and not Siebel 21 I won’t go into too much detail but it should be enough for both sides of the process (Intelligent Advisor and Siebel 20/21) to understand what has changed, what is new and what has gone away in respect of the integration. If you are interested in learning what is new in Siebel 20/21, then hop over to our other website and get trained!
The first and most important new point is that the basic Workflow Processes and Integration Objects (for the request and response mechanism for the check-alive metadata Web Service operations) are already in the vanilla Design Repository. This saves a lot of time importing from Zip files and the like. So in that respect the White Paper is not needed to begin with.
But there might be some side-effects from this presence in the Repository. There is a good chance that the version of Intelligent Advisor API that you want to use, is not the one that your Siebel Design Repository is providing. This is a common issue with metadata sitting in Siebel, and agile products like Intelligent Advisor that change and evolve. A picture is worth a thousand words:
Intelligent Advisor and Siebel 21 : Getmetadata Errors
The metadata in Siebel Tools is old and probably has not changed in a while. It has user properties and a structure that is not in line with the version you are using. If you get this:
Then the reason could be this mismatch. Remember that CheckAlive might be perfectly OK and give you a green light – because it does not use any Siebel integration components in it’s response – but the commonest issue is the one shown above. If Soap UI seems to work, even though you get the red error message shown:
Then take the output from SoapUI and paste it into a new Static Metadata Connection:
Intelligent Advisor and Siebel 21 : Getmetadata Response
Notice the warning message – you are generating getmetadata-response but it is an outdated version because the Siebel integration objects are out of date. At this point you have three options
- Reimport the WSDL definition for your version into Siebel Tools, and make sure everything hangs together
- Ask Oracle to keep the metadata up to date in the Siebel vanilla repository
- Just rewind your versions in the OPA Hub Connection definition, until you find the latest version that supports what you are getting back from Siebel.
I’m in a lazy frame of mind since I am still on vacation. So, in my case of a demonstration environment using Siebel 20.12 and Intelligent Advisor 20D, which actually uses Connector API 12.2.18, I end up with this in the Connection dialog:
And in Siebel, the Inbound Web Service is updated to this:
Once these versions are aligned (do not forget to Clear Cache) with the actual response you are getting out of the SOAP call, Oracle Policy Modeling should wake up and show you the getmetadata response information without errors :
The second point is that the XSLT files are also in the base release, sitting on the Siebel Server in the XSLT folder. I did find that these files were not necessarily 100% correct, for example the “is-required” attribute seemed to be missing from the template part that handles the Fields, so I added it to the file with a static default – or a more complex instruction if you want to read directly from the Integration Component Field properties. Your mileage may vary, but with Siebel and Intelligent Advisor, editing the XSLT is a regular feature.
So now you are ready to begin working with your Connection. In the next part of this article, when I get back to the office, we will look at the other operations and also what happens when you remove the old metadata and start again. Plus we will be studying Load and Submit processes.
You can find more about the Metadata Service in the online documentation. If you are looking for broader help in getting up to speed with Intelligent Advisor, check out our Intelligent Advisor online training modules.
Other posts on this and similar topics you might be interested in:
Thanks as ever to the wonderful Phil W for his assistance in writing this article.