Thursday, February 02, 2012

E-Business Suite and APEX integration (overview)

For me there are two main use cases to integrate Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) with Oracle Application Express (APEX):

  1. In my APEX application I want to include/integrate data that exist in EBS
    e.g. I want to include my employees that are in EBS HR

  2. The EBS application needs to be customised and I use APEX to do that
    e.g. I want to show a calendar with the birthdays of my employees
    or I want a chart about the different age categories in my company
    or I want to bulk update some information and there is no screen to do that

In both cases you want things to go seamlessly, you shouldn't be aware that you go from one technology to another. APEX and EBS data are in the Oracle database, so accessing data is not a big issue. Updating data in EBS you need to be careful with, as directly updating data through tables is not allowed (supported).

When I was reviewing ways to retrieve data from EBS and create/update/delete data in EBS from APEX I found a couple of methods that are interesting to explore further:

Retrieve data from EBSUpdate data in EBS
1. ViewsX
2. APIsXX
3. OITs (Open Interface Tables)
X
4. Webservices (incl. BPEL/SOA)XX

There are other ways to integrate or interface with EBS e.g. through EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) and EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), but from an APEX perspective the above four seemed to me the most interesting ones to explore further. In my next posts I will dig into integrating APEX and EBS with the above techniques.

References to interesting readings:

Previous related posts:

4 comments:

raoul said...

Nice post. Read the previous post on it and was interested. Is there a way to test run EBS, just to try out stuff?

musta said...

Hello every body,

I have the same issue, i have a release 12.0.6 EBS installation and i wante to use apex to extende my ebs application. one off the requrement is to installe an stand alone IAS to configure mod PLSQL.
My question is :
is it possible to configure mod plsql using the apache installed with discovrer application?
, if it is possible so i have not to install additional IAS.

Thnks for your contributions.

Dimitri Gielis said...

-) Raoul, You can download EBS from OTN I believe and try it. I asked a provider (MCX) to give an environment to test things.

-) Musta, you should go with the APEX Listener instead of mod_plsql as that is disabled by default in EBS 12 (and I believe not supported anyway in EBS 12 if you would turn it on)

Bill Carlisle said...

Hi Dimiti!
I love your posts!
I've been working on integrating APEX4.2 with EBS 12.0.4 using the APEX Listener.
I have followed the example that Rob West wrote up and have the LaunchApex.jsp (Custom not GTW)
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/apex/apex-ebs-wp-cabot-consulting-169064.pdf

I read R11i can be integrated by using modplsql, R12 uses the new jsp solution, BUT not until R12.1.3
What about between R12.0 and R12.1.3 ?

Our customer isn't upgrading for another 6 months but want to start developing EBS with APEX.. what about unsupported? that would work because we would go to product until the upgrade is done..

Thanks, Bill