This chapter provides an introduction to customizing Oracle Communications Order and Service Management (OSM) interfaces.
Before customizing OSM, it is important to understand what needs to be done and to design the solution properly.
This topic is further explored in OSM Modeling Guide.
There are two areas of OSM that you can customize:
External interfaces, which interact with other systems and which you customize to meet specific business requirements. This includes OSM Web Services, OSM automation and OSM Security callback.
User interfaces, which you customized per installation or per individual user. This includes using behaviors to manipulate data, adding custom menu actions of the Task web client, and localizing user interfaces.
The two primary external interfaces for performing automated fulfillment are OSM Web Services and OSM automation. Additional external interfaces include OSM Security Callback and the OSM XML API.
OSM Web Services provide the primary interface for in-bound order operations such as creating or canceling an order. Web services are typically initiated from customer relationship management (CRM) systems and other order sources that need to create and manage orders in OSM.
This topic is further explored in "Using OSM Order Management Web Services."
OSM automation provides the primary interface for outbound operations to interact with external systems to achieve automated order fulfillment. Outbound operations are initiated by OSM through automated tasks and automated notifications.
Automated tasks and automated notifications are not limited to outbound operations: Automated tasks can send outbound messages to external systems and also receive in-bound messages back from the external systems. (Automated notifications only send outbound messages to external systems; they cannot receive in-bound messages.) Additionally, automated tasks and automated notifications can perform internal business logic or update the OSM database.
This topic is further explored in OSM Modeling Guide.
OSM Security Callback allows you to generate an audit trail log of users before they gain access to order data that is considered sensitive. OSM provides a callback interface that is designed to intercept order access from defined functions.
This topic is further explored in "Using OSM Security Callback."
The OSM XML API is deprecated for all uses except the following:
Customizing the appearance or functioning of a task when customization using behaviors or OSM Java server pages does not satisfy all of your requirements.
Using from within an automation plug-in when necessary because the Web Services API and the OSM automation functionality do not meet your requirements.
For information about the OSM XML API, see "Using the OSM XML API."
The following sections briefly describe the ways you can customize the OSM user interfaces (UIs).
Behaviors provide the ability to customize data validation and data presentation in both the Task web client and the Order Management web client. OSM defines several behavior types, and you can define instances of behavior types on data elements defined in the data dictionary, for an order, or for a task.
For information about behaviors, see OSM Concepts.
The custom menu actions and items feature provides the ability to configure custom menu items and actions that are called from the Context menu of the Task web client Worklist and Query Result pages.
This topic is further explored in "Using Custom Menu Items and Actions."
Localizing OSM is the process of changing the user interfaces from the original language in which it was written to another language. You can localize the Order Management web UI and the Task web UI. This processes involves modifying OSM XML files.
This topic is further explored in "Localizing OSM."
Oracle recommends that you use Oracle Diagnostic Logging (ODL), which is used by most Oracle Fusion Middleware applications, to generate and manage the system log messages. See OSM System Administrator's Guide for more information.
Several tools are available to you when customizing OSM, as described in the following sections.
Oracle Communications Design Studio is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE). Design Studio is a separate software that comes with your OSM installation, along with Design Studio plug-ins specific to OSM that enable you to configure and customize OSM. Detailed information on using Design Studio to customize OSM is presented in OSM Modeling Guide.
Apache Ant is an open source software application often used for automating application build processes. See OSM Installation Guide for the required version of Ant.
Ant uses XML to define targets which are executable commands that perform a specific task. By default, the XML file is named build.xml.
Installing Design Studio OSM-specific plug-ins provide the build.xml file, which can be used to automate building automation plug-ins. Ant is also used by the XML Import/Export application, as described in the following section.
See OSM Modeling Guide for information on installing Ant.
OSM includes the option to install the XML Import/Export application, a set of customizable Ant commands that help you manage data when dealing with multiple OSM development and test environments.
You can also use the XML Import/Export application to manage data when dealing with multiple OSM production environments. This topic is further explored in OSM System Administrator's Guide.
To model OSM orders, you must have a working knowledge of the XPath and XQuery languages.
You typically use XPath statements to specify the location of data in OSM entities. You use XQuery statements to find and filter data needed for OSM functionality. You can use XQuery in situations where a more expressive language or transformation abilities are needed.
An XPath tutorial is available at:
https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xpath_intro.asp
An XQuery tutorial is available at:
https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xquery_intro.asp
Note:
In OSM, XQuery statements are limited to a maximum of 4000 characters.