OCI PunchOut in Infor e-Commerce

Here is my first test of Open Catalog Interface (OCI) in Infor e-Commerce.

About OCI

OCI is a standard from SAP from around year 1999:

It competes with the cXML standard from Ariba also from around year 1999.

I will use OCI for PunchOut with e-Commerce, i.e. for a buyer to place an order in a seller’s e-Commerce, and retrieve the order in the buyer’s system (e.g. SAP, PeopleSoft).

Documentation

Infor e-Commerce supports OCI out of the box. Unfortunately, the documentation is meager, and when Infor acquired Lawson they removed the examples and screenshots of all documentation:

Thankfully, the old Lawson documentation still has examples and screenshots:

If we are familiar with Infor e-Commerce and OCI, and if we have the old documentation, we can figure it out.

1. Configuration for seller

Let’s configure the seller’s e-Commerce B2B, with role, customers, and users.

One time only, go to Business Center > Roles, select the desired role (e.g. Reseller), enable the Feature Element OCI Capable, and click Save:

For each customer, go to Business Center > Customers B2B > select a customer (e.g. 66045), and in the Customer Details > OCI Agreement, enter the Agreement Name/Description, Valid From/To, and Contact Person Buyer/Seller, and click Save:

For each user of each customer, go to Business Center > Users B2B, select the user (e.g. Thibaud), and in User Details > User Roles, enable the OCI Capable role (e.g. Reseller), and click Save:

2. Configuration for buyer

Setup the buyer’s OCI software (e.g. SAP, PeopleSoft) to launch e-Commerce with the URL in the following format:

https://seller.com/infor-ecom-b2b/cc/Default2.jsp?@user.userid=tlopezschneider%40ciber.com&@user.password=Password123&reqpage=ItemList.jsp&HOOK_URL=https%3A%2F%2Fbuyer.com%2FOCI

Where:

• https://seller.com/infor-ecom-b2b/cc/ is the base URL to Infor e-Commerce B2B Customer Center (replace the host, port, and path as needed). I had tried the B2C URL, but the reqpage had no effect, it only worked with the B2B URL.
• Default2.jsp is the e-Commerce OCI page
• @user.userid is the e-Commerce userid
• @user.password is the e-Commerce password
• reqpage=ItemList.jsp is the e-Commerce parameter to request the Item List landing page
• HOOK_URL is the buyer’s OCI URL that will receive the e-Commerce order (ask the buyer for that URL), e.g. https://buyer.com/OCI

As usual, the parameter values must be URL-encoded in the URL.

That URL will launch e-Commerce, will authenticate the user, and will land the user in the items page, ready for the user to place an order.

3. Place an order

The user launches e-Commerce using the URL configured above (e.g. from SAP, PeopleSoft), the URL will authenticate the user to e-Commerce, and land directly in the e-Commerce items list:

Add items to the shopping cart as usual, go to View cart & checkout. Then, click Retrieve Order, it is a new button for the OCI Capable role:

At that moment, e-Commerce will logout, and will send the order to the buyer’s sytem by making an HTTP POST request to the specified HOOK_URL with the order details as x-www-form-urlencoded name/value parameters in the body:

Verify the order on the buyer’s system (e.g. SAP, PeopleSoft). That completes the process flow.

OciTestPage.jsp

There is a page OciTestPage.jsp that you can use in HOOK_URL for testing purposes:

But it seems to have a few problems in my environment, and I kept getting an HTTP 302 re-direct to the home page, so I had to fix a few things:

• The parameter NEW_ITEM-VENDORMAT had an incorrect index, I had to correct it manually from [2] to [0].
• It did not work with my User B2B Thibaud, it says “You are currently not authorized to see the requested page. Please login and try again.” I had to switch to admin, I must be missing a Role.
• I had to force the parameter retrieveorder to any non-null value.
• There is a parameter ocirul which I do not know how to use.

Future work

• OCI does not support edit and cancel operations of requisition orders, unlike cXML, so I must find a workaround.
• Most OCI implementations have customized tweaks, deviating from the standard, so I have to find the source code for OCI in e-Commerce, and see if I can modify it accordingly.

Conclusion

That was my first test of OCI in Infor e-Commerce for a buyer to PunchOut to a seller.

Special thanks to Wayne Liu and Karl Bonne at Infor for the help.

That’s it!

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