Chris Malek
Chris Malek is a PeopleTools® Technical Consultant with two decades of experience working on PeopleSoft enterprise software projects. He is available for consulting engagements.
About Chris Work with ChrisPeopleSoft Simple Web Services (SWS)
Introducing a small but powerful PeopleSoft bolt-on that makes web services very easy. If you have a SQL statement, you can turn that into a web service in PeopleSoft in a few minutes.
Contents
- All about PeopleSoft Integration Broker Nodes
- Node Best Practices
All about PeopleSoft Integration Broker Nodes
Nodes are NOT used in REST in PeopleSoft. If you are exploring REST, then you can safely ignore this section.Integration Broker Nodes are a conceptual representation of an integration end-point. This end-point generally represents a target system or server that is integrating with PeopleSoft. A node can represent a PeopleSoft system like HCM or Finance. Alternatively, it could represent an external system like Salesforce, Workday or your SSO system. The node name is used as a parameter when submitting requests to the httplisteningconnector. It tells the integration broker how to route and authenticate the user. It generally resolves to a valid PeopleSoft user defined on the node.
Nodes in PeopleTools are defined here:
Node are used in various aspects of the PeopleTools Stack including:
- Configuring integration broker “routings” for external systems (except for REST)
- This is the functionality we care about in this book.
- Setting up PeopleSoft to PeopleSoft data syncs. (These are still routings but I will classify them differently)
- Defining “Portal Content References” to organize component navigation in the menu.
- Configuring SSO Trust between different PeopleSoft Systems.
Node Types
There are 3 node types that you can use.
- External - This is used to represent a non-PeopleSoft node. We are really going to spend most of our time talking about this type.
- PIA - This is used to represent a PeopleSoft node
- IcType (ignore) - This is to setup a old PeopleSoft system. I doubt this is being used by anyone.
Authentication Types
There are 3 types of “Authentication options” on a node.
- None - Do not ever use this. It means that any system that can target your Integration Broker server and craft an HTTP message to send messages as this node with zero authentication. There are some rare edge cases where you don’t want any authentication.
- Password - This authentication uses a password on the node itself. If the client specifies the correct password then all PeopleCode will execute with the security that the “Default User ID” has. So if the a user knows the node password, they can effectively call web services that the OPRID on the node has access to.
- One point that is often confusing is that the “Default User ID” normally does not have a password. The client specifies the password on inbound
- This password applies to inbound integrations NOT outbound integrations
- See Audit Queries for Integration Broker
- Certificate - I have never seen this used with 3rd party integrations. If I find an example, I will come back and document this.
Anonymous Node
There is a special node in PeopleSoft called ANONYMOUS. Please see the Properly Securing the ANONYMOUS IB Node section.
External Nodes Properties
- External USER ID - This is used for outbound integration and applies to using WS-Security with SOAP. If you are not using SOAP then ignore.
- External Password - This is used for outbound integration and applies to using WS-Security with SOAP. If you are not using SOAP then ignore.
- IB Throttle Threshold - This is used for outbound asynchronous operations. You can limit the number of messages delivered in a minute to stop PeopleSoft from flooding an external system with messages.
- The
connectors tabcan be used to define HTTP properties
Best Practices
For Node base practices see the Node Best Practices chapter.
WS Security
TODO: Need to show example of the WS Security options and how the outbound wrapper is set.