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Status Future consideration
Workspace App Connect
Created by Guest
Created on Apr 24, 2024

RELATED IDEAS

Enhancement to create an bar file based on a Designer flow yaml file Our requirement

We want to develop App Connect Designer flows and stage the flows via different environments. E.g. we want to stage a flow via a test and quality assurance environment to a final prod instance (‘classic approach’). For the staging we need to modify partly the “configuration” of the flow (e.g. accounts objects, but also details like queue names etc.). Further the files (source code) should be stored and handled in a Git repository. Well the good thing is that the designer already provides a “(self-containing) yaml definition” of the flow. However for the deployment we need to convert the yaml to a bar file. Currently this functionality is only provided by the Designer ‘under the cover’. This means the only way to get a ‘deployable bar file’ is to manually import the yaml and export the bar file. Which is a quite cumbersome process (and I guess a showstopper for many customer projects). It would be much better to have an easy option to create a bar file out of the define yaml file. Our thoughts are e.g. via command line or a simple REST API call to the designer. Looking forward to your thoughts / feedback.

Idea priority Urgent
  • Admin
    Ben Thompson
    Reply
    |     May 20, 2024

    Idea Review. Thank you for taking the time to raise this enhancement request. When operating the Designer flow authoring tool within the context of our software container offerings (ACE Certified Containers / Cloud Pak for Integration) we appreciate the need for offering users improved methods for integrating with pipeline tools, which would include the topic of retrieving the source for a designer flow and building it into a BAR file for deployment. When using the Designer authoring capability within the context of our managed cloud service we are less convinced as we think the majority of users on that platform would expect it to be entirely self supporting using features built in to the platform without the need for any external pipeline tool. So, focussing the requirement on software use-cases, we appreciate the need as expressed. Interestingly, this requirement takes us into deeper areas such as the preferred way of reusing Designer flow artifacts across multiple environments, perhaps requiring key properties to be overriden. As you may well be aware, this kind of override activity has been solved historically in our core ACE software offering using both BAR file overrides and also runtime overrides using policy files in policy projects. We would want any solution in this space to sit well with those existing capabilities, and would also most likely want to exploit existing pipeline commands offered by ACE such as the ibmint command so that there is a continuity of experience for both Designer and Toolkit flows. We are expecting the first steps on this journey to be made with our next major engineering release of our software product. For those keen on getting more detail on this, please join our Early Experience Program (an update presentation in February of this year started to lay out some of the anticipated detailed steps on this journey). Status of the suggestion is updated to Future Consideration.

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