This week I've been doing too many things at once and surprise, surprise, things didn't quite go the way one would hope. I've been working on SAP PI middleware maps - a bit like poking your eyes out with an overly long hot poker, starting to work on an OBEX interface between one of our pumps and SAP, and trying to get a working backup scenario for the R&D server.
It took us more than two days to clean up and get working our first PI inbound interface. It has not been helped by the fact that the BOMI warehouse software lies - it doesn't send fixed length files in reality... or that we needed one IDoc in SAP per line in the BOMI file - something that SAP's PI middleware doesn't do without "magic". In the end we got it all working but it's been a real palaver and we're not happy with the solution.
OBEX was more challenging and didn't go well until I got the PumpConnector tool from R&D which turns our pumps into an OBEX server that can be reached over a selected IP address and port. It's not ideal but I can now get a gzipped stream on the log file onto the client PC. The next challenge will be to decompress it and find the entries in the vast XML file that I want, and then send them back over the original CGI request to SAP.
Finally just before the holiday I got HP DataProtector installed and working on the R&D server. Previous backup solution had been more Heath Robinson...
