Integrate OSB with Oracle MFT

Recently, I had an opportunity to work with a customer on MFT integration with OSB.

Some pain points were;
1) Ever-increasing FTP servers across their enterprise which was increasingly becoming tough to manage and maintain.
2) Custom code for compression/decompression logic before/after file transfers
3) Bunch of third-party utilities for scheduling file transfers
4) Java code exposed as API for PGP encryption/decryption

Obviously they had a lot of integration touch-points while putting together a file transfer solution - which also meant multiple points of failure and not to mention the maintenance/debugging nightmare if something were to go wrong.

One of the cool features of Oracle MFT is that it supports out-of-the-box integration with many technologies including OSB. For many OSB users, the following could be some of the use-cases where they could take advantage of MFT and reap benefits;

Traditional OSB implementations used File/FTP adapters for file transfers - No real visibility into the transfers and not the best of designs to manage/maintain.

With Oracle MFT exposed as a webservice it is now just a seamless webservice invocation - with the added benefits such as real-time visibility, OOTB scheduling, Compression, PGP encryption, ease of maintenance to name a few..

Use-Case 1: OSB triggers a MFT transfer

In this use-case OSB would trigger a MFT transfer. MFT would then fan-out the transfer;
a) Decompress, Decrypt and store in file system
b) Initiate a SOA process to do further processing (human task etc..)

Creating a MFT Source:

Step 1: Login to Oracle MFT console (http://hostname:port/mftconsole)

Step 2: Go to the Design tab. Click on the Sources and create a new OSB source as shown below;

Creating a MFT Target:

Step 3: Now, click on the Targets and create a new MFT target (This can be a webservice, SOA service, FTP, sFTP, File etc..).
In this case, we would be creating 2 targets - one SOA target and a File target as shown below;

Note: For the SOA target - I just created a simple SOA composite with MFT adapter...

Now. let's create a Transfer - nothing more than linking the source & target on a canvas.

Step 4: Click on the Transfers and create a new MFT. In the MFT canvas, drag and drop the OSBSrc to the source panel. Similarly, drag and drop the OrderSOATarget & PutFile targets to the target panel. Note that "decompress" and "decrypt" pre-processing actions are added to the targets. These are out-of-the-box capabilities that you can leverage with Oracle MFT.

That's all. Now just define a business service in OSB as usual that will trigger the transfer in Oracle MFT. You can obtain the MFT (OSBSrc) source webservice URL by just opening the source.

Use-Case 2: Oracle MFT invokes OSB proxy service

Here we will pick a file from the embedded FTP server (FTP & sFTP servers are embedded and comes out-of-the-box with Oracle MFT), and invoke a OSB target.

Step 1: Click on Sources and create a new source of type "FTP Embedded" as shown below;

Step 2: Click on Targets and create a new target of type "OSB" as shown below

Step 3: Click on the Transfers and create a new MFT. In the MFT canvas, drag and drop the FileSrc to the source panel. Similarly, drag and drop the OSBTgt to the target panel

Done. Now, let's see how to create a OSB proxy service that will consume the MFT transfer.

Step 4: Login to OSB console. Create a proxy service based on the WSDL available @ $FMW_Home/mft/integration/wsdl/MFTSOAService.wsdl (While source/target type is chosen as OSB or SOA, MFT exposes the web service based on this WSDL contract)

Note: Ensure that the proxy service URL and the MFT OSBTgt URL matches.

As easy as that.