1. Release Readiness Guide
  2. Feature Summary

1 Feature Summary

Column Definitions

  • Feature: Provides a description of the feature being delivered.

  • SR Number: Identifies the SR number associated with the feature, if any.

  • Delivered: Identifies whether the feature is Enabled or Disabled upon initial delivery.

  • Scale: Identifies the size of the feature. Options are:

    • Small: These UI or Process-based features are typically comprised of minor field, validation, or program changes. Therefore, the potential impact to users is minimal.

    • Large: These UI or process-based features have more complex designs. Therefore, the potential impact to users is higher.

  • Customer Action Required: You must take action before these features can be used. these features are delivered disabled and you choose if and when to enable them.
Feature Delivered Scale Customer Action Required?
Technical Architecture Enhancements

Enabled

Small

No
Updated Solution URLs

Enabled

Small

No
Merchandising File Transfer Services

Disabled

Small

Yes
OAuth for REST Service Authentication

Disabled

Small

Yes

Technical Architecture Enhancements

With this release, all of Oracle’s Merchandising cloud services are moving to Oracle’s Next Generation SaaS Architecture. This is a cloud-native, container-based architecture that is more secure, highly scalable, and allows for better up-time and availability.  This is accomplished by leveraging a Kubernetes cluster management back end, connected to an automated Oracle database service.  This new architecture will yield the following benefits:

  • Significantly reduced downtime due to fully automated deployment pipelines for all updates and patches

  • Full adoption of OAuth 2.0 for all ReST services

  • Significant improvements in middle-tier and application-tier scalability

  • Higher overall throughput due to leveraging all customer hardware (including disaster recovery) for day-to-day activities, resulting in no wasted environments

  • Adoption of proactive monitoring and alerting via industry standard tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK

Updated Solution URLs

With this release, the Merchandising cloud services will be deployed in a new data center. As such, the URLs used to access the services and some of the associated tools will change. The basic structure of the URLs is as follows:

https://<$service>.retail.<$region>.ocs.oraclecloud.com<$customer_subnamespace>/<$application_context_root>

The components that vary by customer are the region and customer sub-namespace portions. Region will be based on the data center where your environment are located and the sub-namespace portion will contain an acronym for your company name along with type of environment (for example, prd, stg, and so on).

Below are the common portions of the updated URLs are shown below.

Solution/Tool URL

Invoice Matching

https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/ReimViewController/faces/Home

Invoice Match REST Services

https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/ReimRestService/

Merch Mobile

https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/MerchMobile/

Merchandising File Transfer Services

File Transfer Services (FTS) used by all of the Merchandising cloud services are being exposed in this release, replacing SFTP. The services are used by all of the Merchandising cloud services, including the Data Conversion tool. They will allow you to manage uploading and downloading files to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage, which is an internet-scale, high-performance storage platform that offers reliable and cost-efficient data durability. For each customer environment, buckets, which are logical containers for storing objects, will be created in Object Storage. Any type of data, regardless of content type, is stored as an object. An object is composed of the object itself and metadata about the object.

Access to the buckets is through a pre-authenticated request (PAR), which is a URL that requires no further authentication to use to upload or download files to the bucket. To retrieve a PAR, you must use the appropriate file transfer REST service. These new services will enable you to import files to and export files from Object Storage used by the solutions. The primary role of these services is to ensure that only valid external users can call the service by enforcing authorization policies. Listing and deletion of incoming, outgoing and reject files are also supported.

Note:

These services will support files of up to 512MB. Where supported, the files can be zipped. Any larger files will need to be broken into multiple files before sending through these services.

For more details see the Oracle Retail Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service Release Readiness Guide.

OAuth for REST Service Authentication

OAuth 2.0 is industry standard protocol for authorization. Merchandising cloud services REST Services now supports OAuth 2.0. In order to invoke these services you will need to obtain access token and use it as a bearer token.

Note:

Basic Authentication access will not longer be supported for these services. Allocation CS services still use Basic Authentication with this release.

Steps to Enable

In order to obtain a token and call the services, use the following steps:

  1. Get an access token using OAuth client id and secret from IDCS.

    1. export ACCESS_TOKEN="$(curl -u <Client ID>:<Secret> -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8' --request POST https://<IDCS_BASE_URL>/oauth2/v1/token -d 'grant_type=client_credentials&scope=<Customer Environment Specific Scope>' | jq -r '.access_token')"

    2. The token is generally valid for 1 hour.

  2. REST clients that need to call Merchandising REST service end points should use the client id and secret of the OAuth client generated in the previous step to get access token.

OAuth tokens can also be obtained by ReST client tools like Postman for testing purposes by filling in the necessary details like client id/secret and scope. Use the below information in such cases:

  • Authorization: OAuth 2.0

  • Access Token URL: https://<IDCS_BASE_URL>/oauth2/v1/token

  • Client ID: <Client id of OAuth client app>

  • Client Secret: <Client secret of OAuth client app>

  • Scope: <Custom environment specific scope>

curl --location --request GET 'http://<hostname or IP address>:<port number>/RmsReSTServices/services/private/Common/vDate' \        --header 'Authorization: Bearer $ACCESS_TOKEN'