ConnectPlaza™ Analyze is the tool to inspect all your messages as they have passed through the ConnectPlaza™ Flows. Every flow can be fitted with Wiretaps to ensure proper capturing of the data as it flows through the flow. Analyze is perfect for tracing and tracking messages and ensuring all steps in a flow are completed successfully. However, tracking and tracing messages may get complex and difficult when dealing with larger number of messages. Also finding the correct data in a large pool of technical message data may become challenging. Therefore, we added the Business Entity feature. This allows you to configure a set of rules in Analyze to allow it to search for message data that corresponds with a certain piece of business-related data such as documents that are relevant to your business and or applications. Business Entities are essentially configurations that specify what business-related data is flowing through ConnectPlaza™, by defining them as part of the ruleset. Additionally, you can specify several configurations to tell Analyze where to look for your relevant data, how to identify it, and how to extract useful information to make retrieving and finding Business data much easier. Through this way you can use Analyze to actually find your business-related documents, by searching for them using business identifiers such as document numbers, dates or other business relevant search keys and speed up your search.

We want to show how you can quickly create, deploy and test a simple interface. In these series of tutorial videos we will be demonstrating some of the possibilities by building several uses cases in ConnectPlaza™. In this video we will be demonstrating how to build a simple File to File integration as an introduction to ConnectPlaza™. We will be touching on how to configure such a flow in Constructor, build a bundle, deployment of the bundle and a test to make sure the interface works. We will also be touching on Dynamic Properties. We will use Constructor to build the Flow and bundle the Interface, then Deploy to perform the deployment to the runtime agent and a running Runtime Agent to execute the flows as needed. And we will test our flow by placing a file into the input folder, which should be transferred to the output folder as configured.

The Agent is a powerful software component that drives all the integration in your organization. As a fully functional and scalable software component, you can easily run several Agents in your environment to serve your integration needs, but we first we have to go through a few requirements to get things started. First you will need a running server platform like Windows or Linux. This may also be a virtualized environment. Please see our list of supported platforms on our website for more info. The server should have a running Java version 8 installed to get started. You will need enough rights to install the Agent as a background service to autostart it on boot up. The Agent software is delivered as a ZIP package and can be unpacked once it has been downloaded. To download the agent please open ConnectPlaza™ Deploy and choose the Agent you wish to work with.

Exposing data from your application through a standardized protocol such as REST or OpenData is becoming an important part of doing business. Since it is necessary to have data available in your environment for other apps, users and processes, it is important to be able to explore your data fast and reliable. I will show you how ConnectPlaza™ achieves this. First off I have a Progress® OpenEdge® Application Server that is running some ABL code that produces customer data in XML format. This procedure takes an input variable that can specify a customer ID to look for a specific customer in the database. We are going to reuse this existing functionality to expose the data through a REST API using JSON. We will be exposing 2 REST functions, GetCustomers, which will retrieve a list of all customers and GetCustomerById, which retrieve a single customer based on its ID. The REST functions will deliver the data in JSON format.

In this video I will be demonstrating how to build a simple HTTP integration flow. We will be touching on how to configure such a flow in Constructor, upload resources, build and deploy a bundle and a test to make sure the interface works. First off what do we need to achieve this? We will need to use the Constructor to build the Flow and bundle the Interface, Deploy to perform the deployment to the runtime agent and a running Runtime Agent to actually execute the flows as needed. We will build a flow that will expose an HTTP endpoint and will retrieve a predefined dataset from a file. We will test our flow by executing a request through the browser to perform a GET request.