I want to share what’s been happening to me this few weeks, by the way I am a working on connecting SAP PI with Swift Alliance Access which uses a SOAP protocol that is not compatible with PI. The main reason is that the SOAP client has to ask for a session, get the message, process it, deliver the session and then close the session.
I have to develop the adapter because it would be the most stable solution. ccBPM could help but we had to many messages volume to be stabile. Monitoring with the ccBPM would not be easy either.
Some of the insights of its development process because we still develop it. I feel like New in The Matrix. I can bend the rules of the universe, or at least in PI. I have to admit the process is a lot more challenging in the other hand in the custom adapter you can almost bend the universe and figure out how to move it and things as working as expected to be and that’s very helpful on some perspective because you are limitless to help make a better integration. The bad side would be the more durations you make the more complicated the product to develop and maintain them.
Some of the learnings I got for developing a customer adapter for previous clients. There I had a hard time figuring out how to develop the adapter framework, how to deploy the adapter, how to make RAR, SDA to make sure that this where deployable. So the second adapter you got this framework and start working on it and use it time after time. Starting from the sample adapter and then setup I got from my previous clients about developing costumer adapter. I was able to get a new adapter running in a couple days developing on a test system so I can assure that it is working smoothly. I work on it sometime getting the system up and running so we could be able to deploy, test the solution and quality testing and figure out if the process is correct and see if we can modify or fixed some bugs with the system because you have the flexibility so why not use it to make sure the PI development becomes as simple as possible and make it easy to anyone so that’s the things we are dealing with lately. In the beginning you can connect and make it work easily and then afterward you have all these fixes and correction making sure tiny bits work as they're supposed to be.
This video talks about my thoughts on the adapter support.
One of the big issues I have with this is supported. How can I leave the code in a good shape, to the client can maintain it the way he needs.
What support issues have you had when developing your adapter.
- Is it just you want to just new functionality?
- Is it bugged that occurs because of new use cases? One issue I experience on a previous project was with the MQ adapter. When I wanted to test if the MQ connection worked it left an open connection on the MQ server. I have to remove this.
So I need your ideas about this one "Do you see a lot of requiring support for extending the functionality of a custom build adapter?" If you have some ideas about this please share them in the comment section below and I we will discuss it further.