E-Business Suite and APEX integration (overview)

Posted by Dimitri Gielis on February 2, 2012

For me there are two main use cases to integrate Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) with Oracle Application Express (APEX):

In my APEX application I want to include/integrate data that exist in EBS
e.g. I want to include my employees that are in EBS HR

The EBS application needs to be customised and I use APEX to do that
e.g. I want to show a calendar with the birthdays of my employees
or I want a chart about the different age categories in my company
or I want to bulk update some information and there is no screen to do that

In both cases you want things to go seamlessly, you shouldn't be aware that you go from one technology to another. APEX and EBS data are in the Oracle database, so accessing data is not a big issue. Updating data in EBS you need to be careful with, as directly updating data through tables is not allowed (supported).

When I was reviewing ways to retrieve data from EBS and create/update/delete data in EBS from APEX I found a couple of methods that are interesting to explore further:

	Retrieve data from EBS	Update data in EBS
1. Views	X
2. APIs	X	X
3. OITs (Open Interface Tables)		X
4. Webservices (incl. BPEL/SOA)	X	X

There are other ways to integrate or interface with EBS e.g. through EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) and EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), but from an APEX perspective the above four seemed to me the most interesting ones to explore further. In my next posts I will dig into integrating APEX and EBS with the above techniques.

References to interesting readings: