Changing your ADF Connections in Enterprise Manager with PS5

With Patch Set 5 of Fusion Middleware you can finally change your ADF connections ( like a Web Service connection ) in the Enterprise Manager Web Application. So you can make one application deployment and deploy it to acceptance and production.
In many cases ADF and JDeveloper automatically creates connections ( like a ADF WS DataControl )  which could not be changed after deployment, you need to do this before deployment or change the EAR.
With PS5 you can change these connections in the "Configure ADF Connections" menu option on the application deployment ( EM ). This is also possible with WLST where you can change and persist the attributes of the application connection MBean.

If you want to do this you need to do the following steps

• Have a WebLogic domain which has a configured MDS repository.
• Add some listeners to the web.xml ( for the MBean support). 
• Enable MDS ( else the connection details won't be persisted ).
• Add an ADF Connection on the Web Service entry when you use a Web Service Proxy.   

In this blogpost I will show you the steps how to make this work and change in this example the endpoint of a web service.

We start for example by adding an ADF WS DataControl.

This will always add a ws connection to the connection.xml file in the ADF META-INF Folder.

This is also possible on a Web Service Proxy when you don't use an ADF WS DataControl.

Select the service and right click on Create ADF Web Service Connection.

Click on OK

Use the service and finish your Application.


Prepare your Application for allowing to change your ADF Connections.

First we need to add the ADFConnectionLifeCycleCallBack and the ADFConfigLifeCycleCallBack listeners  to the web.xml. This enables the ADF Connection Mbean support.

Enable User Customizations ( across sessions using MDS ) and Enable Seeded Customizations.

We are ready to deploy our application.

You should see the MDS and Connections Tabs when you deploy from JDeveloper.

Optional look at the connections.

After deployment we change the WSDL URL and endpoint in the Enterprise Manager.

First select your application deployment.

Here we can see our connection. Because we enabled MDS on the application we can change the connection else you won't see the Edit , Delete buttons.

Change the WSDL URL by clicking on the Edit button. Click on OK and apply the changes. The new URL is stored in the MDS repository.

Also click on Advanced Connection Configuration where we also need to change the endpoint address and click on Apply.

We are ready to test the application with the new WSDL url and endpoint.

Optional
You can also change these with WLST,
for this you need to go the System MBean Browser of EM to find your mbean for example oracle.adf.share.connections:ApplicationName=YourApp,Location=WLSserver,name=ADFConnections,beantype=Runtime,type=ADFConnections,Application=YourApp

Use MySQL 5.5 as MDS database repository in FMW 11g R1 PS5

One of the new features of Fusion Middleware 11G R1 PatchSet 5 (PS5) is the support for MySQL 5.5 as Meta Data Services (MDS) repository. This means you can use MySQL database as a store for ADF personifications or as policies store for your OWSM domain. For MDS you just need a small database which store these configurations. For the SOA infra repository ( not supported on MySQL )  I think the Oracle Database will always be the best choice ( tuning, transactions, RAC ).
This way you add the MySQL database on the same machine as your WebLogic Domain without taking a lot of machine resources, less maintenance or thinking about licensing costs.

In this blogpost I will show you the steps how to create a MDS repository for OWSM and ADF.  

First we start with downloading MySQL 5.5 and install it on a machine. I will use InnoDb as database engine and UTF8 as character set ( this is probably best tested by Oracle).

Add or change the following database settings in the my.cnf of the MySQL database.


innodb_file_per_table
innodb_file_format=Barracuda
innodb_large_prefix
log_bin_trust_function_creators

sql-mode=NO_BACKSLASH_ESCAPES

max_sp_recursion_depth=10

The first 4 settings are required by the RCU installer ( Repository Creation Utility )
The sql-mode is necessary in OWSM else you will get a SQL error ( escape ' \'  on a like ) when you start the WebLogic Domain.
the max_sp_recursion_depth=10 else you will get this error Recursive limit 0 (as set by the max_sp_recursion_depth variable) was exceeded for routine mds_internal_createPackageRecursive

Start the RCU installer and select MySQL Database as database type. I will use root as username cause it needs to create a table ( schema_version_registry)  in the test database  and it wants to create a new database.

MySQL does not support all options but for us, the Metadata Services option is enough. Besides MDS, MySQL is also supports ODI ( Oracle Data Integrator ) and Enterprise Performance Management, I personally don't know these products so I can't test them for you .

RCU creates a dev_mds database and an user dev_mds user.

It will create the following tables

For OWSM, I also created a dev1_mds database with the RCU which I will use in the WebLogic Domain creation ( EM, JRF and OWSM as domain options ) . I used the dev1_mds as database and DEV1_MDS as MySQL username

Now we can start the OWSM WebLogic domain and deploy our protected Web Services.

We can also use it in ADF, for this we need to open the Enterprise Manager application, select your domain and go to Metadata Repositories. Click on Register.

I create a new MySQL user which has access to the test and dev_mds database.


grant all on dev_mds.* to mds@'%' identified by 'welcome';
grant all on test.* to mds@'%' identified by 'welcome';

the test database contains the RCU schema_version_registry table which contains all the entries.

use mds as username and test as service name.

Now you can register  you own MDS database repository.

That's all.

Configure WebLogic Resource Adapters with ANT

When you use a JCA adapter in Oracle SOA Suite or OSB then you know that you need to configure a plan of some WebLogic Resource Adapter.  With this ANT script I tried to make this an easy task for you and which you can repeat on different WebLogic Domains. This ANT script can easily add multiple EIS entries to the following adapters: DbAdapter, AqAdapter and JmsAdapter in just one run. After these changes to the resource plans this script will redeploy only the changed Resource Adapter.

Special thanks for my colleague Michel Schildmeijer for inspiring me to make this flexible script and off course for the necessary WLST code.

Important to know.

• Run this script on the AdminServer, else it won't find the Resource Adapter Plans
• First you need to create a Plan for the 3 Resource Adapters (Db,Aq,Jms) and add a dummy entry, think how you name it and where you put it.
• When a plan is changed and you have a soa cluster or the soa weblogic instance is running on a different server then you need to copy the plan to all servers or put it on a shared storage.    

If you don't like this then you can always create new Resource Adapters by following this blogpost.

Let's explain how it works

first you need to change some variables in this build.properties

default this scripts runs against the weblogic dev settings.  You can change this to your own and configure the dev entries ( dev entries at the bottom of the build.properties )

wls.environment=dev

Where are the adapter rars located in your FMW domain, this can be in your SOA or OSB Home of the FMW domain.
connectorLocation=C:/oracle/MiddlewarePS3/Oracle_SOA1/soa/connectors/

Then add your own EIS entries, these ones in this var will be added to weblogic.
resourceAdapterEntries=hrDB,hrAQ,cf1JMS,cf2JMS

Think if you need to set the XA or Not XA datasource property or in Jms the connectionFactoryLocation.

# AQ entry

hrAQ.type=aq

hrAQ.eisName=eis/AQ/hr2

hrAQ.property=xADataSourceName

hrAQ.value=jdbc/hrDS

# DB entry

hrDB.type=db

hrDB.eisName=eis/DB/hr2

hrDB.property=dataSourceName

hrDB.value=jdbc/hrDS

# JMS entries

cf1JMS.type=jms

cf1JMS.eisName=eis/JMS/hr3

cf1JMS.property=ConnectionFactoryLocation

cf1JMS.value=jms/MyCF

After you can run the ANT script 

ant -f build.xml createResourceAdapterEntries 

Here you can download the code on github

https://github.com/biemond/soa_tools/tree/master/ant_resourceAdapter

Here is the whole build.properties file 

The wlst part with the wlRedeployResourceAdapter and wlCreateResourceAdapter macrodefs

And at last the build.xml

Identity propagation with OWSM

OWSM allows you to pass on the identity of the authenticated user to your OWSM protected web service ( thanks to OPSS ), this username can then be used by your service. This will work on one or between different WebLogic domains.
For example on the client side you can have an web application which uses ADF Security or Container security, the application calls an web service with the help of a ws proxy client or an ADF ws datacontrol. The web service can be a SOA Suite, OSB proxy or a JAX-WS service.
To make this work we need to use SAML policies, SAML allows us to do identity propagation, other policies won't work because you need to have the password of the authenticated user which you don't have.
Before I show you, how this works, you need to have a SAML OWSM environment, I already did this in this blogpost Do SAML with OWSM , in this I generated some keystores and configured OWSM  on all the WebLogic domains and deployed a web service which has the oracle server wss11_saml_token_with_message_protection_service_policy. In my case I used JAX-WS but it also works on SOA Suite and OSB. When you want to do this on different WebLogic domains then you need to make sure that the user identities exists on both domains ( or you can enable virtual users ).
On the client side which will be in this case an ADF Web Application which is protected by ADF Security. In this application I will use a ADF WS Datacontrol on which we will add the SAML client policy wss11_saml_token_with_message_protection_client_policy.

Create the ADF WS Datacontrol. Select the DataControls.dcx file and select the service in the Structure window.

 Click on "Define Web Service Security".

Select oracle/wss11_saml_token_with_message_protection_client_policy in the security Tab

Override Properties,
these settings will work on the SOA Suite server, if you want to use this on the saml server then you need to use www.amis.nl as saml.issuer.name and samlkey as keystore.recipient.alias.

Deploy the application to the WebLogic Server and you are ready to go.