1 Feature Summary
Column Definitions
-
Feature: Provides a description of the feature being delivered.
-
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 | Module Impacted | Delivered | Scale | Customer Action Required? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Technical Architecture Enhancements |
All |
Enabled |
Larger |
No |
| Updated Solution URLs |
All |
Enabled |
Small |
No |
| Merchandising File Transfer Services |
All |
Disabled |
Small |
Yes |
| New Foundation, Inventory, and Pricing Services |
Merchandising, Pricing |
Disabled |
Larger |
Yes |
| OAuth for REST Service Authentication |
Merchandising, Sales Audit, Pricing, Invoice Matching |
Disabled |
Small |
Yes |
| External Web Services Configuration |
Merchandising |
Enabled |
Small |
No |
| Data Conversion File Upload Changes |
Merchandising |
Disabled |
Larger |
Yes |
| Initial Data Seeding for SIOCS |
Merchandising, Pricing |
Enabled |
Small |
No |
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 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. See also OAuth for REST Service Authentication.
-
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 industry standard tools, such as Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK, for improved monitoring and alerting.
-
Centralized Oracle Retail BI instance for easier reporting administration
-
Retirement of SFTP in favor of a service-based approach (see Merchandising File Transfer Services)
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 |
|---|---|
|
Merchandising |
https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/Rms/faces/RmsHome |
|
Sales Audit |
https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/ResaPortal/faces/Home |
|
Pricing |
https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/Rpm/faces/Home |
|
Invoice Matching |
https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/ReimViewController/faces/Home |
|
Allocation |
https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/Alloc/faces/Home |
|
BI Publisher Reports |
https://<hostname>/<tenantname>/xmlpserver |
|
Data Conversion |
https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/DataConversion/faces/Home |
|
Merchandising SOAP Services |
https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/ |
|
Merchandising Omni Integration REST Services |
https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/MerchIntegrations/ |
|
Merchandising REST Services |
https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/RmsReSTServices/ |
|
Sales Audit REST Services |
https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/ResaReSTServices/ |
|
Invoice Match REST Services |
https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/ReimRestService/ |
|
Pricing REST Services |
https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/PricingServices/ |
|
Allocation REST Services |
https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/Allocation16/ |
|
Merch Mobile |
https://rex.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/MerchMobile/ |
|
Process Orchestration and Monitoring (POM) User Interface |
https://home.retail<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/POMJetUI/ |
|
Process Orchestration and Monitoring (POM) Services |
https://home.retail<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/ProcessServices/ |
|
Retail Home |
https://home.retail.<Region Name>.ocs.oraclecloud.com/<Customer Subnamespace>/retailhome |
Merchandising File Transfer Services
File Transfer Services (FTS) used by all solutions in the Merchandising Cloud Service Suite are being exposed in this release, replacing SFTP. The services 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 or from the bucket. To retrieve a PAR, you must use the appropriate file transfer REST service. The primary role of these services is to ensure that only valid external users can call the service by enforcing authorization policies.
More details are available in the "File Transfer Services" section of the Merchandising Operations Guide - Volume 2.
New Foundation, Inventory, and Pricing Services
This release introduces new services that will be used to integrate foundation, item, and pricing information from the Merchandising and Pricing solutions to the following Oracle Retail cloud services:
-
Oracle Retail Customer Engagement CS (version 20.1 and later only)
-
Oracle Retail Order Broker CS (version 20.0 and later only)
| Services used by ORCE | Services used by OROB |
|---|---|
|
|
These services replace the previous method of integration, which leverages the Oracle Retail Integration CS (RICS) component referred to as omni-channel data service (OCDS). Existing services via RICS will remain to support integrations with older versions of these solutions, as well as for backward compatibility for 3rd party solutions. Additional services were also added as part of this release that are not leveraged by ORCE nor OROB; these services will be used in the future to support integration with other Oracle Retail solutions and are included in this release for integration with 3rd party solutions, if desired.
These new services for both Merchandising and Pricing use new Merchandising system options to determine which Oracle Retail solutions are being used in your implementation and are backed by a new set of tables that hold the integration data in json format for the supported entities. If using these services in support of a third party equivalent of the Oracle Retail solutions supported by this functionality, you can set the system option for that Oracle Retail solution to checked (Y). For example, if implementing with a third party CRM solution, you could set the ORCE system option to checked to leverage the above listed integration points.
The service call queries the json message from the new tables to serve the consumers. These new tables require initial seeding from the base tables, for the Merchandising services, and continuous maintenance to keep them updated for changes in the base tables. The initial data loading and continuous maintenance is carried out by new batch jobs.
-
Bulk Data Processing: This process is used for bulk maintenance of the json cache table. The bulk data batch processing is generally applicable during to do the initial loading of the json cache table or if an enhancement to the service requires a refresh of existing cache. This process also supports purging the json cache tables in scenarios where there are no active consumers for a service.
-
Delta Processing: Delta processing is used to populate/merge the delta changes that were made to the base Merchandising and Pricing tables into the respective json cache tables based on interface change log table entries. The delta processing job for each API has to be scheduled to run at regular frequency throughout the day to scan the change log tables for changes and build the json messages to keep the delta update ready for the consuming system.
Note:
The Pricing services item/price and item/promotion do not use the Bulk Data Processing batches. They are only delta services.Lastly, a new code type and codes were added to hold organizational hierarchy level names that are used by some of these integrations. These code descriptions should not be updated with dynamic hierarchy names if changed in Merchandising and should not be set to Used = No.
Steps to Enable
The following steps are required to enable the use of these new services:-
Set New System Options - to enable the use of these services with the above listed Oracle Retail solution that you have implemented, you will need to set the associated system option in Merchandising to checked (Y). This can be done through System Options UI following these steps:
-
In the Merchandising task list, select Application Administration > System Options.
-
Navigate to the Service Based Integration sub section under Integration section.
-
Update the respective system option which required integration with merchandising.
-
Click Save and Close to save your changes and exit the system options screen.
-
-
Enable Batch Jobs - see below for the steps for enabling batches.
System Option Updates
| Attribute Name | New or Updated? | Description | Patch Default |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Oracle Retail Customer Engagement |
New |
Indicates whether or not Oracle Retail Customer Engagement CS is integrated with Merchandising through service based integration. Valid values are Yes (Y) or No (N). |
N |
|
Oracle Retail Order Broker |
New |
Indicates whether or not Oracle Retail Order Broker is integrated with Merchandising through service based integration. Valid values are Yes (Y) or No (N). |
N |
|
Oracle Retail Order Management |
New |
Placeholder for a future release. |
N |
|
Oracle Retail Xstore Suite |
New |
Placeholder for a future release. |
N |
|
Service Integration Cache |
New |
Indicates how many days of history should be retained in the cache tables used for service based integrations starting from the date the record was included in cache to be picked up by the related service. Valid values are integers between 1-60. |
35 |
Batch Schedule Impacts
| Process Name | Process Type | New/Updated? | Delivered |
|---|---|---|---|
|
MERCHAPI_DELTA_CYCLE_PROCESS |
Cyclic |
New |
Disabled |
|
MERCHAPI_REFRESH_CYCLE_PROCESS |
Cyclic |
New |
Disabled |
|
MERCHAPI_PROCESS_ADHOC |
Ad hoc |
New |
Disabled |
|
RPM_PRICE_CHANGE_CLEARANCE_CACHE_CYCLE_PROCESS |
Cyclic |
New |
Disabled |
|
RPM_PROMOTION_CACHE_CYCLE_PROCESS |
Cyclic |
New |
Disabled |
|
RPM_PRICE_CHANGE_CLEARANCE_CACHE_ADHOC_PROCESS |
Ad hoc |
New |
Disabled |
|
RPM_PROMOTION_CACHE_ADHOC_PROCESS |
Ad hoc |
New |
Disabled |
Steps to Enable
-
If the services are integrated, the batch process should be enabled for full refresh and delta data processing using the Batch Administration screen of POM.
-
The process MERCHAPI_REFRESH_CYCLE_PROCESS should be enabled for initial load and data refresh. The process MERCHAPI_DELTA_CYCLE_PROCESS, RPM_PRICE_CHANGE_CLEARANCE_CACHE_CYCLE_PROCESS and RPM_PROMOTION_CACHE_CYCLE_PROCESS should be enabled for delta data processing.
-
These processes are setup as cyclic processes to allow them to be running continuously and hence this should be configured in Recurring tab and at individual hourly cycles. The delta process should be running throughout the day and should be enabled in all the hourly cycles. The process for initial load/refresh can be setup to run less frequently - once or twice a day.
-
Along with enabling the cycle process, review the list of the jobs in Batch Administration screen and enable the jobs only for the services that are planned to be used.
-
Review the job parameter to configure the sleep_seconds parameter for the delta data pre-processing (for Merchandising data only). The sleep time configuration controls the frequency in which the delta updates are processed and loaded into the json cache table. The default configuration is 15 min for every API. This can be changed to configure how soon an update to a data is available for the consuming system in the service call.
-
The delta and initial jobs for Merchandising also support a parameter called exec_seconds that defines the duration of run for every instance of that batch job run. The delta processing job will keep on polling the ICL table at every sleep_seconds duration and will end the job when exec_seconds is reached. The configuration of exec_seconds should be done based on how many hourly cycles the jobs were configured. The default configuration is for 2 hours run of each batch call.
-
Along with enabling the jobs and process, the scheduling of the process has to be performed using the Scheduler Administrator screen. The enabled process should be selected and the start time should be configured. Example - If there are 12 cycles for MERCHAPI_REFRESH_CYCLE_PROCESS defined, 12 schedules with a gap of 2 hours should be defined at say 12:30am, 2:30am, 4:30am and so on.
Code Updates
| Code | Code Type Description | Code | Code Description | New/Updated? | Delivered |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
ORGS |
Organization Hierarchy mapping sequence |
CO |
COMPANY |
New |
Y |
|
ORGS |
Organization Hierarchy mapping sequence |
CH |
CHAIN |
New |
Y |
|
ORGS |
Organization Hierarchy mapping sequence |
AR |
AREA |
New |
Y |
|
ORGS |
Organization Hierarchy mapping sequence |
RE |
REGION |
New |
Y |
|
ORGS |
Organization Hierarchy mapping sequence |
DI |
DISTRICT |
New |
Y |
|
ORGS |
Organization Hierarchy mapping sequence |
ST |
STORE |
New |
Y |
|
ORGS |
Organization Hierarchy mapping sequence |
WH |
WAREHOUSE |
New |
Y |
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.More details are available in the “OAuth for REST Service Authentication” section of the Merchandising Operations Guide - Volume 2.
External Web Services Configuration
In this release, the External URLs listed below and the relevant information to invoke them will now be maintained via the Application Properties workflow as part of the Oracle Retail Application Administration Console (ORAAC). Previously these were configured via a table (RETAIL_SERVICE_REPORT_URL), but this updated approach provides more self-service for customers to configure this information.
| Service Name | Key |
|---|---|
|
GL Account Validation Service URL |
accvalidation.service.url |
|
Drill Back Forward Service URL |
drillforward.service.url |
|
Customer Order Address Service URL |
custordaddress.service.url |
|
Customer Address Service URL |
custaddress.service.url |
Two services for retrieving promotion and offer level details from Oracle Retail Customer Engagement Cloud Service (ORCE) were also configured in the above mentioned table. These have been moved to be internally configured only. If you previously had your URLs configured in the RETAIL_SERVICE_REPORT_URL table, these configurations will be updated for you on patching. If you were not previously using these configurations, then these can be added by following the directions in the Oracle Retail Merchandising Administration Guide in the Application Properties section.
Data Conversion File Upload Changes
As with other file transfers that are changing in the Merchandising cloud services as part of this release, the Data Conversion tool is also changing its data file upload and download processes. It has been enhanced to use the Merchandising File Transfer Service, rather than SFTP.
The changes include,
-
Using "uploadFiles" method within the REST Service for uploading the input files.
-
Using "downloadFiles" method within the REST Service for downloading the error files.
Details on the Merchandising File Transfer service are available in the Oracle Retail Merchandising System Operations Guide, Volume 2.
Additionally, there are two other changes to note for data conversion for this release:
-
During upload, the tool will now support only zip format files. However, there can be multiple .dat data files within a zip file.
-
The URL for accessing the tool has changed. The details on this change can be found in Updated Solution URLs.
Steps to Enable
In order to upload files for the Data Conversion tool, or download files from the tool, you will need to start leveraging the service based file transfer process described above. For more information on using this feature, see the Merchandising File Transfer enhancement in this document.Initial Data Seeding for SIOCS
This release brings in a change in how initial data seeding and periodic on-demand refresh by store is performed in Store Inventory Operations Cloud Service (SIOCS) when implemented with Merchandising. Prior to this release, bulk data integration (BDI) was used for initial seeding and periodic on-demand refresh by store. Going forward, Merchandising and Pricing will expose data views which will be used by SIOCS to pull data for initial seeding and periodic on-demand refresh by stores. The existing BDI proceses will remain in Merchandising for backward compatibility for a period of time after initial release before being retired.
See SIOCS documentation for more details on this process.