API Enable Mainframe Applications - Screen Capture Approach

Key Takeaways

[Music] now let's look into the process for screen capturing approach and here provide an API from an existing Mainframe as well in a few step but building on the user screen workflows as we see on the right hand side and on the left hand side it could again be API consumers and we are using our applinks Eclipse based software AG designer and the process is to capture the screen workflows and then afterwards we can again generate these assets into the API provider in the same approach and consume it then from an client application and now let's look into a demo about using App links to integrate 8270 user screen flows so here we will start with the application on the main frame so we have also an applinks uh AppLink site and here in this AppLink site you can close some of these previous uh Windows here to make it more clearer we again are connected to our API provider we have hosts and we have an application here an insurance application with a session and I will log into the session so that you see how how this looks like and this is another terminal emulation that is available even you can see inside of eclipse and I could also use the terminal emulation that we saw before but just to show you the strength of logging in to an environment with the integrated uh emulation so here I'm now really locking into this to this environment and you see it took over my session because I'm I'm the same user and I will now navigate back to to our is PF and on this level I will now start a demo application it's called demo ins and this is the one that we want to use for this scenario the demo Insurance Solutions so I'm switching here to the customer menu that we have and this is an application where we have an insurance solution and we can browse different customers so I can type here value of 18 or let let me take another 12 122 we get Robert Greening and we can modify his data and look into the details of this record so we see we have on gring a Swiss Ambassador and we can navigate to other Pages here to get some additional information like that is from Berlin and U now I'm navigating back in this uh in this process and I will show you in this step how applinks works so this is users workflows yeah that we are using and there are three assets relevant in applinks first of all the identifications of these screens yeah so we have particular screens as object and in this case we are in Bros customer screen and you can see how these different fields are identified yeah so they we have see nice colors that are showing us these fields and they consist of identifiers so that the particular screen is identified and Fields where you can input or output specific uh values of these fields and you are supported with the tools of applinks to identify and also yeah create these these screens it is not necessary to create a screens but it's definitely helpful to do so as it really afterwards make it much more transparent and readable when you record the steps going through these different screens and Maps so that you can bundle this as a service a path how it's called in app links to retrieve it as a service so I will try to give you an impression how such an uh service is recorded in this in this uh manner yeah so let us uh simulate one activity here and uh we can do a record ing of of this of this path and therefore I will activate the path and here record this process so I will start with a recording and now begin with uh some simulation so I can specify an input value and here type in for example a value 27 and uh then I can click on enter I will remove this input value and navigate to the next field type here in M get to the details of Charles keple and now we can specify some output values so I can take the ID the last name and I can take some additional information here like the the the job and the nationality and now I'm already fine I could remove this output I can click on stop and I can give this a name call it get customer short and after creating this process you see here the steps that are that are happening that's automatically recorded what is done we can see this here and uh I will not go into the detail in regard to time but it should just give you an impression how these activities that I was doing in maps are now reflected in this path procedure with different mapping activities and the outcome is that I can now rewrite run this this type of path so I could move here back to this this page remove this information here click so that this yeah reset it and then I could now run this this this process to give you an impression how this works so I'm clicking here on on run I will now get uh the value returned for this 27 value that I have specified that was put it in and now you could see how it is navigating through this application getting Charles keple in the background and here returning some values on the right hand side that I have specified as output parameters the ID the last name the first name and the occupation in the long value so this is to give you an impression how this recording Works how these paths are navigating through the screens and are able to retrieve you these values and now I can look out and give you the impression how this is created as a service now so each of these paths can be used as a rest service to be consumed and for this I will here create an an Connection in the background the connection allows us to have a connection prepared and in the right position so that paths can start and uh retrieve data and if you want to have a service available it is a so-called procedure group that that we need to create so I will call it the customer service say finish and in this customer service I will add this get customer by ID method and now I have this procedure ready and this customer service I can now deploy into the integration server and again we have our dialogue with our API provider I click next in this case I'm creating an API an applinks connction ction I click on next and I will choose my insurance package I will reduce here some detail details make it simpler call it the customer service connection and on the next page I will call this rest resource uh customer service and click on finish and now the assets are again generated for this service so if I'm switching to the other perspective here and we can close some of them we will see in the insurance package now that we have additional assets and again a rest service and here I can also optimize this a little bit make it nicer now I will remove this get customer by ID and just say it's a customer it's again a get method you're already familiar with this process and now it's mapped to a nice rest service and here I'm already finished so after creating these processes I can now move to another web application that I already and this is the insurance customer web application this is another SP demo application but this is leveraging user workflows in app links and now I will put in here one of these IDs like 27 I will say get customer by and if I created this service right we get the value returned I think this is really cool yeah we have now Charles Chapel returned you remember the actor that we have done we also have another guide 22 for example that is returning Us Robot Greening in whenever I click now on this button I am connecting to our API provider where applinks is running as a component and this component is simulating user workflows on the main frame yeah the one that we saw this insurance application is retrieving this data from sub pages and then giving this back as a rest Json response to this application I think pretty Co [Music]