Let me introduce my guest

My today’s interlocutor was born in the UK but lived most of his life in Sydney Australia where he studied Computing and Econometrics. He has worked in many countries around the world and for many large organisations. Bruno has a diverse background covering 25 years – ABAP programming, integration experience in Seeburger, and then SAP XI/PI, software asset management, innovation, and IT architecture. He has also worked as a ski instructor. He now lives in Switzerland where he runs his own company Arianim where he is the Strategic Architect.

About the IT industry in the late 80s, the innovations introduced by SAP, his company called Arianim, and the future of the SAP systems in his eyes – Bruno Konieczny  is interviewed by Jarosław JZ Ziółkowski.

Reading time: 7 minutes

1. Well, you started your IT career in 1987, working on the MSA/DBS software application, which was a competitor to SAP. So let’s start with a tricky question. Why do you think SAP has been so successful globally?

I started working as a programmer on the MSA software application in the late 80s (SAP was already successful in Europe with their R2 ERP application software). Then in the early 90s, DBS Software bought out MSA, and merged it with its fierce rival, McCormack and Dodge – the merger did not go smoothly. Around the same time, the major shift from mainframe to ‘client-server’ was happening and SAP was very successful in releasing SAP R3.

I think SAP was successful in the early decades because they had a strong customer focus, and because they gained the trust of their customers. In Germany, they have the concept of ‘Mittelstand’. Smaller independent companies that do not prioritise short term needs – instead, they prioritise longer-term societal and environmental requirements, and customers and employees? needs. If you Google for it you’ll find that Germany is rated high for having a long-term perspective.

In the following decades, SAP had a natural ‘monopoly’ advantage, being the leader in ERP software vendors. So it was easier for them to deliver industry-specific and country-specific solutions, further strengthening their hold on the market.

2. Tell us more about the beginning of your IT career. I am curious – how did it all work 30 years ago? Based on your experience, can you confirm that this industry is changing very dynamically?

Sure, let me get out my rocking chair and reminisce *smile*.

I will not bore your readers with a history lesson here – but when I started, we did not have desktop computers and fax machines, and carbon paper was still in use. The company I worked for even ran monthly accounts via batch processing, using punch cards.

The rapid pace of change today is accepted as the new norm – so absolutely very dynamic indeed! But I see one thing that has not changed – our built-in desire to help others and to share knowledge. Thirty years ago, to share best practice and swap tips we would meet at monthly ‘user group’ events. In the 90s there was an MIT hosted ABAP mail group that was invaluable (thank you, Kevin Wilson, for being such a great contributor!). Today we see a fantastic world of sharing, blogs, open-source – which is then feeding back and helping to drive the pace of change even more.

3. And how does it look today in your opinion? Do we lack qualified specialists? Or is the market saturated?

In the monolithic applications space, undoubtedly there is a sufficient  number of specialists. But there will be a shortfall of real experts in the digital & cloud space – in this dynamic environment. There are plenty of opportunities to learn new skills and find projects.

One thought I’ve had – SAP customers have been drowning in all the complexity for years. And SAP’s cloud and provisioning offerings are designed to make life easier for their customers. Will we see a reduction in the need for specialists overall? Will the new digital transformation provide sufficient demand for specialists to shift? The future will tell.

4.  Let’s talk about gaining qualifications. You have studied at two different faculties, and I wonder if the knowledge gained at the university can match the experience we gain during work, for example, on projects? Or maybe it is the experience gained from each subsequent project that offers the real value to an SAP enthusiast?

The old model was going to university, gain some knowledge and relevancy, then get on-the-job experience. Today university is even more important since the job market is so much more competitive, but being resourceful is the key differentiator. My personal belief is that you need diverse knowledge and experience. This means being able to research a topic, leveraging free online courses, reading blogs – and then working all of that into the experience you gain on projects.

5. What about “innovation”, a trendy word recently? You are familiar with it so I want to ask you: how do you see the innovations introduced by SAP?

Innovation is undoubtedly a buzzword. There is an excellent book on the topic called “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, and the author Clayton Christensen has presented together with Hasso Platner during Sapphire keynotes. The book was a ‘must read’ for all SAP upper managers ten years ago, so SAP is very aware of what happens to companies that ignore disruptive technologies.

I find SAPs “Integrated Intelligent Suite” attractive. Of course, there are the obvious things. They’re working on stuff like CPI, and prepackaged integration content, but they now seem to be a concerted effort from SAP to support processes, end-to-end. SAP Graph is pretty promising, building on the ‘One Domain Model’. SAP says that these APIs will make it easier for developers to create solutions that will fast track development. As I see it, this is an opportunity for SAP to abstract away all the integration complexity that many have been struggling with.

6. Tell me a little bit more about your company called Arianim. Such as Int4, you’ve developed the software which is useful in the SAP ecosystem. When did you get the idea to start this company and what was the implementation of this venture?

I first heard about the PI Directory APIs in the late 2000s. These could be used to extract meaningful data on your configured interfaces – but they were poorly documented, and buggy, so I left it.

I came back to this a few years later when I saw a lot of interest in the SAP PI community. There are many blogs written on this PI/PO API topic, such as SAP’s William Li, for instance. As I saw it, overall, there was a massive duplication of effort.

We had the vision of providing a more sophisticated solution, but only charging a fraction of the business value that is delivered. We had clear aims of Simplicity & Transparency – which have always driven our overall direction. Our product UDO was available in 2012, and I believe UDO was the first commercially available product in this space. The first versions supported PI 7.0. I can tell you in the earlier years that it was not trivial to keep it running with each new PI release.

7. What is the application of the tool you have created in the SAP ecosystem? Can it be complementary to other solutions on the market? If so, what can the UDO tool be combined with, and what results such a combination can provide?

It extracts all PI/PO interface data and makes it more accessible to both developers and non-developers. We also developed an automatic documentation feature within UDO – with the click of a button it produces comprehensive and customisable PI/PO documentation – including message mappings. It can easily be incorporated with another tool. Suppose we find a complimentary product in the PI/PO space, where there are synergies. In that case, it makes sense to deliver a more holistic solution.

8. Okay then, Seeburger vs B2B add-on? Which solution is better in your opinion from the perspective of an ERP integration specialist?

Over ten years ago the Seeburger add-on became available for PI – it was good for SAP since they were busy building up other PI functionality and improving the performance. It was undoubtedly suitable for Seeburger too. But now, I think the mature and fully integrated SAP B2B add-on within the PO is the way to go – and it is included in the PO license.

9. Last but not least, I would like to refer to your many years of experience in IT and ask you: what do you think the future of SAP can look like? Do you deem that it is developing as dynamically as the IT industry in general, or at its own pace?

I think that SAP has always progressed at its own pace – it is often late to the market, over-promising and under-delivering. They’ve been able to do this because of their market leader position, and because previously the pace of change was slower. But over the last years, the pace of innovation has considerably accelerated, and SAP cannot be complacent if they want to realise their goal of being the ‘system of engagement’.

They have the potential danger of competition from the hyperscalers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform. Things are also really heating up with competitors – such as SalesForce, from both the software application side and the cloud platform perspective.

There are reports of project failures – which is probably due to the level of complexity involved, but maybe also  due to the aggressive sales tactics, or perhaps the attitude of customers who don’t really know what they want.

To sum, if SAP focuses again on its original core values such as delivering real business value, and taking care of its customers, then they have a great chance of succeeding.

The post The rapid pace of change today is accepted as the new norm appeared first on INT4.

Let me introduce my guest

My today’s guest has been dealing with SAP technologies for nearly 15 years. He has a degree in economics and investment management (PhD), so he could work as a financial or investment analyst. However, he chose a different path and took a deep dive into the world of integration.

About tools which are needed to perform the duties of an SAP Integration Architect, various programming languages in the SAP world, and differences between SAP PI vs SAP CPI – Vadim Klimov is interviewed by Jarosław JZ Ziółkowski.

Reading time: 13 minutes

1. You are a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in Economics and Management with specialization in the area of investments and innovations management. Does university knowledge help you in your daily work?

I feel that major studied subjects on their own have little relation to what I do at work. Still, general skills and attitude towards learning happen to be a common denominator when it comes to different sciences and knowledge areas. It is worth noting that I don’t hold a degree in computer science. My primary subjects at the university were economics, financial mathematics and investment management, so 15 years ago, I was more comfortable with analysis of projects and investments profitability and their economic efficiency than with Java technologies, integration techniques and enterprise integration patterns. It isn’t about specific subjects that I studied at the university and knowledge that I gained during university days and that I utilize now at my job, but about overall skills that help me to learn new technologies and gain new knowledge in IT. The mathematical background helps me to approach this in a – hopefully – more structured way and to look for consistent and consecutive explanations when searching for solutions to problems that I face in IT.

2. Well, your position is called “SAP Solution Architect”. How would you describe your role and responsibilities?

Here where I work now, this position combines a variety of activities, so it isn’t a pure architect role as such. Instead, it is a role that includes design and architecture activities on one side, and hands-on activities, technical deep dive into specifics of products and technologies that are a part of a particular subject area on the other side. I primarily focus on SAP integration products and SAP Cloud Platform services, so all those activities are united by the specific technology stack I work with daily. We have solution architects who have more business knowledge and are more technologically agnostic, as well as technical architects who specialize in specific technologies. I belong to the latter group. Much time I work with other architects and also with vendors on feasibility assessments, prototyping and proofs of concept. I’m also involved with end-to-end solution designs, capability mapping and product positioning in the landscape since integration capabilities go hand in hand with business applications and are rarely met on their own. Apart from that, I closely collaborate with delivery teams on ongoing developments and tests execution. In some projects, I share the role of an integration architect and an integration developer. In some others, where we have a dedicated team of developers, I get involved occasionally in some technical reviews. Since I work in the internal IT team, I also work closely with support teams on significant maintenance activities and incident escalations, especially if those significantly impact business continuity and operations.

3. As you probably know from my previous interviews, I like delving into the answers of my interlocutors. Therefore, I’m wondering what kind of tools do you use to perform the duties of an SAP Integration Architect? Why do you use these tools, and in which way they are helping in daily responsibilities? 

Many tools that I use are related to enterprise communication and documentation tooling. We have a lot of virtual meetings, and we have to maintain a decent amount of documentation, both graphical like landscape diagrams, system component diagrams, process and integration flows. And also textual – I mean specifications here. Historically, different teams used different tools to produce and maintain those documentation artefacts, the company now also explores cloud-based services as a replacement to on-premise tools, and we need to ensure that tools are compatible with Windows, Linux and MacOS. However, the stack for documentation and conferencing is predominantly Microsoft based. More recently, we started to look into tools that can consolidate some design documentation aspects. Thanks to this, we can maintain data about landscape, its components and their relationships. I mean systems, services, environments, processes, integrations and data flows and so on. More consistently and centrally and then reuse different pieces of information when needed. Here, I mean enterprise architecture tools that can be used for collaborative modelling and analytics. Nevertheless, we are at the beginning of this journey yet, so documentation is still quite partitioned.

I ended using a combination of the latest Eclipse release (for Java EE and Spring development), NetWeaver Developer Studio that is also based on Eclipse (for PO-centric development), IntelliJ IDEA (I use Community Edition – for Groovy development) and Visual Studio Code (for Node.js development). IntelliJ IDEA and VS Code are tools that I use almost daily. Their core functionality was complemented with several extensions and plugins that enhance my productivity.

API testing is another area that occupies a lot of my time. Here, I mostly rely on Postman for generic APIs and occasionally use SoapUI for SOAP-based scenarios. We have a dedicated testing team in the organization. Still, sometimes I need to build and execute a performance test script rapidly – and this is where I find Apache JMeter very handy, thanks to its flexibility and modularity. I use Windows as a primary operating system, but I often need to use Linux tools and execute Linux scripts – so Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is yet another tool that I use a lot.

4. Since you mentioned programming before, I have to ask how many programming languages do you know and what are you using them for during your work?

There are several languages that I use very often. Those are languages that have immediate relation to SAP integration products I work with, and I mean such programming languages like JVM languages, namely Java and Groovy. When working with integration scenarios, it is also common for me to get involved in ABAP, especially when it comes to SAP backend systems and XSL, which occupies a niche in message transformations. Nowadays, I have less engagement into ABAP development as compared to my involvement a few years ago. We have dedicated ABAP developers in our team now. Generally speaking, when it comes to ABAP topics, I spend more time debugging rather than developing in ABAP. For the last few years, I also got interested in JavaScript and TypeScript – specifically, in a context of backend development such as Node.js. You know, it sometimes helps when building rapid prototypes.

The more we progress with automation, the more I try to get myself familiar and up to speed with some shell scripting languages. Primarily, Bash, and secondarily, PowerShell. Still, I need to learn a lot there before I will feel comfortable in command and scripting languages.

Last, but not least are some markup and style sheet languages – in particular, HTML and CSS. By no means am I a front-end developer. However, front-end development is exciting, and I would like to have a better knowledge of modern front-end technologies and frameworks. Still, basic knowledge of HTML and CSS combined with a general understanding of JavaScript turn to be handy in my work from time to time.

5. From what you’re saying, I deduce that dealing with many things at once is not a challenge for you. However, are there any at all that you have to face in your daily work?

One of the most commonly faced challenges relates to project planning – dependencies and prerequisites assessment and estimation of integration efforts. Especially, when it comes to integration with basic core SaaS services provided by different vendors. As you know, integrations with SaaS services offer some substantial simplifications – for example, a lot of them embrace API-led integrations and streamline service discovery and consumption. On the other hand, the term “API” is overloaded and broadly interpreted these days; we can even say it’s also misinterpreted. Because of that, we come across so many different services that follow different design patterns and that all are generically referred to as “APIs”. In practice, it means that, combined with fundamental differences in underlying data model layer, service layer, and limited service customization capabilities compared to their on-premise counterparts, it often significantly contributes to the increased complexity of orchestration in integration scenarios that have to ensure those services can play together consistently.

Another challenge relates to the entire shift of a mindset when moving from on-premise to cloud integration platforms. A decade ago, I started working with SAP on-premise middleware systems. Firstly, with SAP XI and PI – and later, with PO and AEX. All of them provide a very extensive toolset for fine-tuning and tweaking of underlying components as per customer needs and requirements. For example, cluster sizing, JVM tuning, or, finally application server’s core services.

What’s more, all of these are highly customizable. When moving to iPaaS such as SAP CPI, a customer doesn’t have access to some of these components. Combined with extreme flexibility of the integration framework that lies at the heart of CPI and lightweight ness of shared platform services, developers might be tempted to neglect some best practices and performance optimizations when implementing complex integration scenarios. That can instigate longer-term stability issues.

6. So, exploring this subject a little bit more, I cannot stop myself from asking you which one of them gives you the greatest sense of satisfaction and why?

Technical challenges are what attracts me a lot among other sorts of challenges that are met in integration projects. Resolution of such challenges, observation of something working after the challenge is overcome – that provides satisfaction to me. Though, after I realize that the technical problem was resolved and the integration is functional and operational, I get another challenge – can this be optimized further? The optimization process can require a lot of time and efforts, so it is always a good idea to be clear about what we are optimizing. Then you have to answer the question: What is the purpose of the optimization exercise? For instance stability/performance? Tangible benefits to business stakeholders, simplify maintenance and supportability or finally anything else that is relevant to the particular case and can be reasonably justified. They also have to be measurable – so that we have a good understanding of what was achieved with optimization and when to stop? otherwise, the optimization process can go wild. All of the above involves much continuous learning, and I don’t only mean the first-hand experience. That also includes experimenting, trial and error, but also learning from other experts and enthusiasts. Here, I must show appreciation to SAP product managers and developers who are keen to listen to customers’ feedback and to consider it when building up and updating product roadmap and when considering implementation of new features. And I really admire and get inspired by the SAP Community. Honestly, I learn a lot from community contributions, and I’m thankful that community experts find time to put efforts into sophisticated and mature work that they commonly undertake in addition to their day-to-day jobs.

7. Walking through your profile on LinkedIn, one can notice right away that you have many SAP certificates, mostly related to middleware. Having the rookies in our community in mind, I have to ask, which one was the most difficult to get?

When it comes to SAP middleware related certifications, I got certified in SAP Process Orchestration and SAP Cloud Platform Integration. Even though I had prior hands-on experience with both of these products, I shall admit that I put my time and efforts in preparation for exams. Exam questions test knowledge of the entire product and its capabilities, whereas customer scenarios usually don’t cover the full spectrum of product features and gravitate to the usage of a subset of features that are settled in the specific customer landscape, but do so in greater detail. After that, I explored some complementary areas; this is what led me to SAP Cloud Platform development and SuccessFactors integration certifications, and more recently – SAP Activate certification.

Surprisingly, the most difficult certification to obtain so far wasn’t middleware related. Still, the one related to S/4HANA Cloud implementation using SAP Activate methodology – probably, because it was the least technical certification among those I have taken. It required a decent level of familiarity with a broader range of functional topics, so it was more challenging to techies like me.

8. Let’s go back in time 5 years ago. You used to work for SAP before moving on to consulting. I’m curious – was this experience of any help to you when it comes to your current position? 

Yes, it helped significantly. It was a really great experience for me – I met so many intelligent, passionate and experienced professionals while working at SAP. I shall say that we are still in touch with my ex-colleagues, we share ideas, I enjoy hearing their feedback on my thoughts and I truly trust their professional view on topics that get me excited and interested. Moreover, much knowledge that I have and use now originates from my peers and mentors that worked with me and from whom I learnt and keep learning.

The team I worked with – a Centre of Excellence team within Active Global Support – was focused on the delivery of landscape planning, integration assessment and optimization services to SAP customers. We were fortunate to work with premium customers on one side and with SAP product management and development teams on the other side. These experiences expanded my knowledge about various use cases and pain points that customers faced when using SAP integration products. Thanks to this, we – SAP teams and customer teams – could work together on assessing the feasibility of new integration scenarios or optimizing existing scenarios using best practices from SAP and considering real-life constraints that customers raised. It was an excellent opportunity to explore and step into diverse landscapes of customers coming from different industries and countries – somewhat that can hardly be achieved when being focused on a specific customer’s landscape when working on a customer side.

9. There’s a lot going on right now in your life, isn’t it? You have recently joined the group of SAP PRESS Book authors. I would not be myself if I did not ask you about this new adventure that you took up. So, how is it – to write a book? Are you planning to publish more?

Oh, yes, that was an exciting journey and a great experience! We worked assiduously on the content of the book together with Eng Swee Yeoh – a very experienced and skilled expert and a brilliant person who brought a wealth of knowledge and put it on paper, so it was an honour for me to work together with him. It was also one of the challenges – when you aren’t writing on your own, but are co-authoring with someone so experienced and recognized, you need to go the extra mile to ensure that the produced content is of the highest quality. Eng Swee and I worked closely on each paragraph of the manuscript, we had peer reviews very often and exchanged ideas about already written sections or future sections, so this challenge was addressed comfortably and nicely.

Another challenge was related to timelines. When writing blog posts, I’m usually flexible in regards to when draft content can be prepared, when it is reviewed, finalized and published, as there are no specific deadlines. When it comes to a book writing process, it is divided into particular phases with their milestones, deadlines and deliverables. Given that I worked on a book in my free time, so that book writing didn’t collide with my day-to-day job, the process required continuous commitment and planning for several months ahead. Interestingly, a lockdown that was caused by the global pandemic increased productivity of manuscript writing because I could focus on the book more. We were even able to submit the final version of the manuscript quicker than initially expected and to release the book ahead of the original plan.

As far as writing a new book is concerned, right now, I don’t have immediate plans to start working on a new SAP PRESS BOOK. This process requires a significant amount of time, effort and a topic that will be demanded and advantageous for the community. But in the future – it will be great to get back to this experience. And who knows – it may well be that you see chapter two from me and Eng Swee – “SAP CPI: The Return of Groovy” *smile*.

10. Honestly, I’m counting on it. Today I decided to finish the Interview with a question from my readers. The question is tricky, but I believe you will deal with ease. SAP PI vs SAP CPI – which solution is better in your opinion and of course – why?

May I provide a classic consultant’s answer to this question – “It depends”? *smile*. Seriously speaking, I can hardly think that there is an unambiguous leader between those two, and I would instead think of PI/PO and CPI as products that nicely complement each other, rather than compete.

I like a PI/PO product for its matureness and comprehensive features that are provided by its core runtime services. Also, for a built-in supportability and monitoring tools that are available for customers as a part of the product. Last, but not least – PI/PO can be deployed in a variety of ways in a customer landscape to satisfy hosting and network security requirements, and can be scaled and sized relatively precisely by customers or their infrastructure partners.

Some of these features are currently missing in a CPI service as it is much lightweight, provides less out of the box shared services and are cloud-focused. Deployment options for CPI were enriched and extended over time. However, at the moment, they are still cloud-centric for the entire fully-fledged service offering. I take aside the cloud runtime that can be used in PO 7.5, as that addresses a runtime aspect, but not the complete CPI service offering. But CPI excels when it comes to flexibility of the integration flow – it is way easier to develop complex scenarios that consist of multiple integration steps in CPI than in PI/PO. Still, it is also easier to produce suboptimal integration scenario implementations in CPI as compared to PI/PO. Development and deployment of cloud-centric integrations are much more comfortable in CPI. Another advantage that I see when using CPI is when it needs to be integrated with some other services that are a part of SAP Cloud Platform Integration Suite – CPI already has native integration capabilities for some of them. We are going to see even more improvements in this area in the future.

Moreover, many customers have in-depth knowledge of PI/PO and can fine-tune it. I mean things like tweak the entire runtime – JVM, specific services, or apply scenario-specific optimizations. But performance optimization of CPI runtime isn’t that transparent for customers. In addition to that, customers have to get used to a different technology stack that is used by CPI runtime when moving from PI/PO. Although they both are based on Java, application runtime and integration framework are different, deployment and execution of integration scenarios differ significantly between PI/PO and CPI – which all makes traditional PI/PO customers feel uncomfortable when transiting to CPI. Still, I know that SAP works hard on this and on providing additional tools for PI/PO to CPI migrations.

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Read also:

1. Programming is an art! Secrets of ABAP with Michael

2. He can simplify difficult things like no one else! Finny’s adventures in the world of SAP integration

The post Solving SAP integration challenges by… mathematical equations! appeared first on INT4.

Introduction

In this blog, you will find out how to create Int4 IFTT test cases faster and effectively increase test coverage of your SAP PI/PO interfaces.

You will also learn:

Test case creation methods

Until now there were two methods of creating test cases for SAP PI/PO available in Int4 IFTT:

Both methods allow you to automate the test case creation process to some extent by either importing multiple GUIDs from external sources, like e.g. spreadsheet or transferring multiple messages from Message Selector.

This is feasible for Use Cases where you automate testing of a limited number of interfaces or want to add specific test cases to your existing test suite.

However, there are  situations when this approach is too time-consuming and requires a lot of manual work. Good examples are migration projects where the main objective is to ensure that the entire upgraded system is performing in the same way as the old solution. Verifying this can be very challenging for SAP PI/PO installations with hundreds or thousands of interfaces.  

What is the Int4 IFTT SAP PI/PO Robot?

To speed up the process we created Int4 IFTT SAP PI/PO Robot – a tool, which which is an integral part of Int4 IFTT, and can create:

• Test Case Folder Structure
• Automation Objects
• Test cases ready to be executed

in an efficient and automated way for any number of interfaces. With Int4 IFTT SAP PI/PO Robot you can streamline the test case creation process and reduce the manual work required to build the test suite for your project.

Int4 IFTT SAP PI/PO Robot – setup

You can access Int4 IFTT SAP PI/PO Robot using transaction code /INT4/IFTT_PI_ROBOT.

To set up the tool you have to specify:

1. The environment where Robot will search for messages and download their content

2. Message Selection Criteria:

• • The Time frame for message search
  • List of interfaces for which the test cases should be created
    This list can be maintained manually or imported directly from SAP PI/PO with one click without leaving the Int4 IFTT SAP PI/PO Robot.

Interface list can be restricted to a specific interface, interface namespace and sender-receiver combination.

3. Test case creation parameters which include:

• Test case folder structure creation rules – e.g. grouping test cases by sender-receiver combination or custom hierarchy
• Number of test cases to be created for each interface
• Test case naming convention

For detailed setup and description of all parameters, visit Int4 IFTT User Manual.

Int4 IFTT SAP PI/PO Robot – execution and configuration

After providing all the parameters, the Int4 IFTT SAP PI/PO Robot can be executed online or as a background job.

During the run, Int4 IFTT SAP PI/PO Robot will search for messages in SAP PI/PO for each interface specified in parameters and create required metadata and test cases in the Int4 IFTT database. 

There is a detailed log available for all the runs providing information about the execution process including the number of found messages and created test cases.

You can save Int4 IFTT SAP PI/PO Robot configurations as variants and execute it as recurring background jobs. This is helpful in situations where messages are not available for all the interfaces during the initial run and you want to collect them over the time when they are available on SAP PI/PO system to continuously increase your test coverage.

Summary

With help of Int4 IFTT SAP PI/PO Robot, you can create a large number of test cases in an automated way and immediately start regression testing by running them on the same or different SAP PI/PO landscape configured in the Int4 IFTT.

If you want to find out more about this (or other) Int4 IFTT features, just book a consultation with the product demo or contact us.

The post Int4 IFTT crawler for robotic test case creation appeared first on INT4.

SAP PGP in SAP PI/PO

When developing SAP PI/PO interfaces, one might come across a requirement to provide a more secure way of sending messages back and forth. Especially, when setting up communication with banks, you want to ensure files send to bank reach their destination with original content. We want to be sure nobody modified details of our payment. This requirement can be met with use of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) software, provided with SAP PGP module and adapter modules it provides. The idea behind PGP is to encrypt the message in such a way that only the intended recipient can decrypt it’s content. This is achieved using shared keys.

In the example below, we use Secure Store feature to store encryption/decryption keys, however, SAP PI/PO file system can be used as well.

On the screenshot above we can see three keys imported into PGP Secure Store:

Sender Communication Channel

Now we can configure our communication channels to implement PGP security with provided adapter modules.

First, let’s set up decription for messages we receive from third party. For this purpose, we use ‘localejbs/PGPDecryption’ module in our sender communication channel:

Receiver Communication Channel

In order to send out encrypted messages to third party, use ‘localejbs/PGPEncryption’ adapter module in our receiver channel and configure following parameters:

Learn more!

For more details on additional parameters and allowed values, you can visit website below: https://help.sap.com/viewer/5336c62e683348a8886ff7ef4b15c40f/1.0.5/en-US/08d47f0c5abd4f4f9d0b167ff693b1a7.html

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