My current customer is implementing Hyperion DRM. In DRM Organizational hierarchies are stored. These hierarchies have to be exported to several output formats for several client-systems.

We advised to use Oracle SoaSuite for the integration in stead of building exports for every single target-system. But how do you get the exports out of DRM into SoaSuite? The original idea was to have a schedular call DRM to run the export to a (XML-) file and have SoaSuite polling to that file.

I've looked into the integration possibilities of DRM. DRM has been said to have WebServices but we could, upfront, not find out if the webservices are just Soap-Services (without WSDL's) or "real" Webservices described with WSDL's. It turns out that DRM has WSDL-described webservices. The url to the WSDL should be something like:
http://--drm-server--/mdm_ntier/--service--.asmx?WSDL
Where --drm-server-- is the host where the DRM server with the webbrowser is running, and --service-- is the particular service. So something like:
http://winxp.darwin-it.local/mdm_ntier/SessionMgr.asmx?WSDL

It turns out that the DRM webservices have multipart message-types. The ESB of Oracle SoaSuite 10133 does not like them. BPEL PM seems not having a problem with them. But the wsdl's use imported schemas from:

<s:import namespace="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" >
<s:import namespace="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" >

These need an internet connection to be validated and be used in JDeveloper. What you could do is put them on a local webserver and modify the wsdl's accordingly.

But having solved that it also turns out that BPEL gets a response message that does not seem to conform the WSDL. The message I got was:
"trailing block elements must have an id attribute"
So I created a webservice-proxy on a WSDL and that works fine. Using the HTTP-Analyser of JDeveloper I intercepted the response and although the webservice proxy did accept the response, and apparently is confident with the wsdl, it seems to mee that the response does not match the wsdl. And BPEL PM agrees with me. Or better, I agree with BPEL PM.

So that did not get us any further. I've learned from a contact at Oracle Development that the Webservices from DRM indeed are not supported by BPEL PM. In DRM 11 there are changes made to the webservices in a way that some simpler ones should be accepted by BPEL PM. But apperently others still aren't.

One could wonder how this could be? Aren't webservices just invented to have technology agnostic and flexible integration? I read somewhere that the way the wsdl's of DRM are created are quite regular in the .Net world. DRM is build in Delphi (I was really surprised to see such a high-end Bussiness Application being build with Delphi, since Turbo Pascal was my favorite programming environment on college/university).

DRM also delivers java-API's. To use them you need an sdk from DRM, that can be downloaded here.

We created a java-class using the examples in the api-documentation that is delivered with DRM. Look for mdm_ntier_api_932.pdf. Unfortunately I could not find this information on OTN for you.
This Java class connects with the master-data-management server. Then it looks-up an export, starts a job and then gets the output into a string. This string is then returned. Our businessguys defined some standard exports that deliver the data into an XML message.

On this java class we created a webservice, using the webservice generation wizard from JDeveloper. Actually, since the api's are a layer on the DRM webservices, in fact they are webservice proxies, we created a webservice on several DRM webservices.
This webservice is then callable from BPEL PM.
When deploying the webservice to the AS, you should deploy the jar's from the mdm_ntier_apis-sdk also, with your deployment-descriptor. I tried to upload them as separate shared libraries in OC4J, but that didn't work.

The exported XML message is parsed in BPEL PM using the parse-xml ora:parseEscapedXML function. To be able to transfer it we had to add a namespace in the root element, using
concat(substring-before(bpws:getVariableData('Receive_Export_onResult_InputVariable','payload','/ns1:RunExportProcessResponse/ns1:result'),'<MDMMetadata'),'<MDMMetadata xmlns="http://xmlns.customer.com/drm" ',substring-after(bpws:getVariableData('Receive_Export_onResult_InputVariable','payload','/ns1:RunExportProcessResponse/ns1:result'),'<MDMMetadata'))


In the Workflow Development Kit that can be downloaded using the link above, the same approach is used. So apparently Oracle also found that BPEL PM does not support the DRM Webservices and state that this is the way to go.

I did not put in any code in this blog-entry. But most of the java-code I got from the examples. Except for transferring the export-output into a string. But that is also quite straight-forward. And generating the webservice is just playing the wizard with the defaults.