AIA Components in AIA 30

I installed Jdeveloper, begged and pleaded with my workstation and somehow completed some basic use cases. I tested the different messaging patterns and they worked as expected. But I did not use any of the AIA Infrastructure components during the testing. I had not used EBMs, DVMs or XREFs. So I thought I will do some cases using the components provided by AIA. I assumed we would have to refer to the AIA Components as we used to in 10g (http://ipaddress:port/AIAComponents). But alas, no ! That was not the case !

I went through some samples and found that they had referred AIA Components diferently. The url itself was very different. It was something like oramds:apps/../../../../../..EBM.xsd. Strange ! Then I had to go through the official blog of AIA and found out that I had to create a MDS connection to refer to the AIA Components. A MDS connection is a connection to the Meta data repository where these artifacts are stored. They are referred directly from the server. For creating a MDS connection, your Jdeveloper should have been patched with the SOA Extension. Using SOA Extension, you can create a SOA-MDS connection which in turn will use a database connection with the credentials of DEV_MDS. The SOA-MDS connection has to be created for the workspace and it should be DB based.

Once done, you can refer to the AIA Components using the SOA-MDS connection. This is one feature that is very different from 10g. In 10g its so very simple to refer to the AIA Components but it was pain when moving from one environment to another. We had to run a build to replace the URLs and refer to the AIA Components in that specific environment. In 11g however, when we create a SOA-MDS connection and refer to the artifacts, the URL in the bpel source is like “oramds:apps/AIA Components/Enteprise Object Library/..etc”. The keyword oramds is reserved and appserver understands it refers to the meta data repository. So you no more need the build when moving from one space to another. Enjoy !


Cheers,
- AR