Component Interface User-Defined Methods

Component Interface User-Defined Me...

Microsoft BizTalk Adapter for PeopleSoft Enterprise supports user-defined methods in component interfaces. The signatures are of the form:

myRet=myCI.myMethod(parameter1, parameter2, ...)

where:

parameter1, parameter2 are input parameters.
myRet is the return value.

The parameters can only be input parameters to the method. Only one value can be returned from the method as the return parameter.

Note
The component interface that contains user-defined methods should only have the PeopleSoft Get function enabled. If the component interface has keys, then custom methods will not work.

Custom CI Limitation

BizTalk Adapter for PeopleSoft Enterprise can handle custom PeopleSoft methods provided that the component interface does not have keys. If the component interface has keys, custom methods will not work.

Workaround

Create a new component interface that does not have keys, and write a new custom method that incorporates the keys as part of the calling parameters. For example, you could use the SetPassword custom method in the USER_PROFILE component interface; however USER_PROFILE has keys. You can create a new component interface that has no keys, and then create a custom method in your new component interface. This method would accept two parameters, user ID and password. The custom method could then invoke USER_PROFILE with a Get and then invoke SetPassword. Consult the PeopleSoft documentation for more details.

Due to a limitation in PeopleSoft, Date, DateTime, and Time types appearing in user-defined methods are mapped as strings in the client code.

Collection Limitation

User-defined methods cannot return a collection, or more generally, any API object. This means that you can only return simple types, for example, strings and numbers. You can get around this limitation by sending a collection as an XML string and programming the client to parse the strings to extract the items into the correct format. You can examine the GET_CI_INFO custom component interface to see an example of this workaround.

Sample Custom Method

You can use the following basic custom method, SayHello, to test the functionality of your component interface using custom methods.

The following PeopleCode function is a user-defined method of a PeopleSoft component interface named ACB_EMPLOYEE. The sample returns a string where the return value is Hello followed by the value of the input parameter.

Function SayHello(&sName As string) Returns string
      &EOL = Char(10);
      &sResult = "Hello " | &sName | &EOL;
      Return &sResult;
End-Function;

Note
To modify multiple tables at the same time (using one command) you can either create another component interface or create a component interface user-defined method.

Concepts

Appendix A: Component Interface Methods