1. Batch Operations Guide
  2. Introduction

1 Introduction

Welcome to the Oracle Retail Merchandising Operations Guide. This guide is designed to inform you about background processing, batches, and integration for the Merchandising and Sales Audit solutions. This guide is broken into two volumes:

Volume 1 - Batch Overviews and Designs

Batch overviews tie a functional area description to the batch processes illustrated in the designs. Batch designs describe how, at a technical level, an individual batch module works and the database tables that it affects. In addition, the batch designs contain scheduling information. Batch designs can be referenced by name through the table of contents of this volume.

Note:

Integration batches are covered in Volume 2 in the "Scheduled Integration" section

Volume 2 - Message Publication and Subscription Designs

This volume contains details about Merchandising and Sales Audit integrations. These integrations fall into four main categories:

  • Message-based Integration - These are covered in two sections: publication and subscription. Publication covers RIB messages published from Merchandising to other solutions. Subscription covers RIB message that are subscribed to by Merchandising from other solutions.

  • SOAP Web Services - This chapter provides a summary of the provider and consumer SOAP services supported by Merchandising and Sales Audit, including details on security, URLs, and payload information.

  • ReSTful Web Services - This chapter provides a summary of the ReST services supported by Merchandising and Sales Audit, including details on security, URLs, and payload information.

  • Scheduled Integration - This chapter provides a summary of integrations that are scheduled either to be run once per day or periodically throughout the day. There are generally two types of integrations – those that expect or produce files and those that move data between integration tables, also referred to as Bulk Data Integration (BDI).

Batch Schedule

The batch schedule is a program list with pre/post dependencies for each batch job. For each individual implementation, the schedule is a suggested starting point for the installation.

Some programs are specific to products that may not be installed, so these programs may not be used at all. For example, integration related jobs for Merchandising integration with Oracle Retail Planning solutions.

Note:

When the Merchandising end of day batch jobs are running, the online task flow screens are unavailable. Prior to the batch jobs starting, users are warned to save their work and exit. After a period of approximately five minutes, the batch run starts and users are logged out of the online application. They are not able to access any tasks in the applications until the batch schedule has completed.

Batch Wrapper Overview

In order for the scheduler to execute the different Merchandising programs, batch wrappers have been created based on the following categories:

  • Wrapper for Pro*C programs

  • Wrapper for KSH scripts

  • Wrapper for Perl scripts

  • Wrapper for file-based programs

These wrappers validate that the user has sufficient privileges to access required directories. These are sub directories of the ${RETAIL_HOME} directory.

  • Incoming Directory - Staging directory used for .zip files from external systems to be used as input files in Merchandising programs.

  • Outgoing Directory - Staging directory used for .zip files generated from Merchandising programs for use by external systems. Files in the outgoing directory will be uploaded to Object Storage through File Transfer Service with a prefix of “outgoing/”

  • Outgoing Directory To SIOCS – Staging directory used for .zip files generated from Merchandising programs for use by SIOCS. If SIOCS is on premise, files in the outgoing to SIOCS directory will be uploaded to Object Storage through File Transfer Service with a prefix of “outgoing/to_siocs”.

  • Data Directory - Has 6 sub directories used for File processing and archiving.

    • In Directory - Unzipped files from the Incoming Directory. This directory is used by Merchandising programs as the source for input files.

    • Out Directory - Generated output files from Merchandising programs. These files will be zipped and moved to the Outgoing Directory.

    • Processed Directory - All processed files from In Directory will be moved to this directory. This folder will archive input files.

    • Reject Directory - Generated reject files from Merchandising programs.

    • Temp Directory - Temporary directory for unzipping files.

    • Archive Directory - Output files will be archived in this directory.

  • Wrapper for single-threaded programs.

  • Wrapper for multi-threaded programs.

  • Batch-specific wrappers.