Kategori: IFS Cloud

Elvia er Norges største nettselskap og er ansvarlig for å sikre at nesten to millioner mennesker i Oslo, Innlandet, Akershus og Østfold har strøm i stikkontakten.

 

Align har samarbeidet nært med Elvia i mange år og i overgangen til IFS Cloud har Align bistått i forprosjektet, selve prosjektgjennomføringen og i den påfølgende forvaltingen av IFS Cloud. Align bistår Elvia med løsningsarkitekt, funksjonell rådgivere, teknisk arkitekt/buildplaceadministrasjon og utviklere.

 

IFS Cloud trigger noe viktige prinsipper;

1. Alle aktører i økosystemet skal kunne bistå med CRIM (tilpasninger og konfigurasjoner).
2. Løsningen skal forbli fremtidsrettet og «evergreen», noe som betyr at tilpasninger skal skje utenfor kjernen av applikasjonen for å lette oppdateringer og endringer.
3. Elvia skal kontinuerlig forbli i forkant av teknologisk utvikling, sikre løpende forbedringer gjennom prosjekter, releases, og oppdateringer.

 

En av de mest signifikante endringene med IFS Cloud er bruken av RestAPIer som muliggjør forbedringer utenfor selve kildekoden. Enkelt sagt kan alle applikasjoner som støtter REST-API nå enkelt kommunisere med IFS Cloud uten større tilpasninger, feks. ved bruk av standardiserte low code-løsninger.

 

Et viktig aspekt med samarbeidet er at Align sin løsningsarkitekt er en integrert del av en større arkitektgruppe hos Elvia. Med sin spesialisering på IFS Cloud, arkitektur og metodeverk har løsningsarkitekten spilt en sentral rolle i å veilede Elvia med tanke på egne forretningsbehov og hvordan disse best kan løses – enten innenfor rammen av IFS, gjennom alternative systemer eller i Elvias egenutviklede løsninger.

 

I denne prosessen har også Aligns utviklere jobbet tett med utviklere fra andre selskaper, både for å analysere muligheter i IFS og for å utvikle optimale løsninger ved bruk av RestAPIer. Dette samarbeidet har vært og vil være avgjørende for å utvikle og implementere innovative løsninger uten tunge tilpasninger, slik at IFS Cloud løsningen forblir evergreen i form av regelmessige oppdateringer. Denne strategien er en nøkkel for å maksimere verdien av IFS og styrke evnen til å møte fremtidige behov.

 

Vi i Align ser frem til å oppnå nye forretningsmål sammen med Elvia.

 

Staying ahead of the competition is crucial in today’s drastically evolving business landscape. Every organization is pursuing innovative strategies to enhance efficiency and productivity. IFS Cloud is one crucial piece of the enterprise digitalization journey, and with Microsoft Power Apps serving as the integration platform, it is possible to build mobile apps or automate business processes enriched with AI capabilities.

What is Power Apps?

PowerApps is an enterprise low-code application platform by Microsoft, and it provides a rapid development environment to build custom business apps without the need for coding expertise. Using Power Apps, you can create cross platform business applications through a simple drag-and-drop interface, workflow automation and pre-built AI models.

Power Apps and IFS Cloud

With the API driven architecture of IFS Cloud, extending on the outside and seamlessly integrating external systems like Power Apps is a breeze. Power Apps enable connecting to other external systems using connectors and we could create a custom connector to integrate IFS Cloud according to the needs.

 

In this post, we’ll discuss on how to connect IFS Cloud with Power Apps platform and create a simple, custom-made mobile app within few minutes!

Microsoft Power Apps documentation is a good starting point to setting up everything you need to develop on Power Apps. If you are new to Power Apps, it’s better to spend some time on reading the concept and setting up Power Apps platform for developments.

In this article we’ll discuss following key topics.

• IFS Projections and Custom Connector
• Create IAM client for Authentication
• Creating the Power Apps Custom Connector
• Creating the Power Apps Mobile Application
• Summary

 

IFS Projections and Custom Connector

Key component of connecting PowerApps to IFS is the custom connector. A custom connector is a wrapper around a REST API that allows Logic Apps, Power Automate, or Power Apps to communicate with 3rd party APIs. In IFS terms, a Projection is equivalent to a RESTful API and you can find all the information about the API specifications, documentation using API Explorer in IFS Cloud.

There are two ways to create the custom connector for an IFS projection.

• Build the custom connector using the OpenAPI specification which can be found in API explorer
• Identify the projection calls you need for the integration and build the connector from scratch

 

OpenAPI specification for an IFS projection is usually heavy with many API operations which covers a business functionality within IFS Cloud. If we create the Power Apps connector using projection OpenAPI specification, you could end up creating a connector with many unwanted operations. Therefore, the best approach is to identify specific API operations and create the connector from the scratch according to your needs.

In this example, we are planning to create a simple Power Apps mobile application where a user can search a Master Part  in IFS Cloud by description and get the part details.

As the first step, we can simulate what we need in our app in IFS Cloud to find the information we need using the log window or browser network debugger

• IFS Projection: PartHandling.svc
• Projection Operation: PartCatalogSet
• HTTP Verb: GET

 

We can use the API documentation in IFS Cloud API explorer to identify the URL, request/response samples and HTTP headers which are required to make the request from a 3rd party application

 

Create IAM client for Authentication

Now we have identified the API operations we need to build the connector. Next step is to create the IAM client in IFS Cloud for authentication. We are building an app for IFS end users, where a user must authenticate with IFS for using the app. This can be done by using the End User Authentication (Authorization Code Flow).

Go to IFS Cloud > IAM Client Details, create a new client. Give a client ID, description and save.

Keep the Redirect Uri blank for now. We will fill this after creating the custom connector. Copy the secret after creating the IAM client to be used in the PowerApps connector.

 

Creating the Power Apps Custom Connector

Next step is to start building the connector in Power Apps platform to connect to the IFS Projection and the operation we have identified above.

Microsoft documentation Create a custom connector from scratch is a good starting point to understand what a custom connector is and all the prerequisites needed for building one.

Go to your PowerApps environment and in the left panel, go to More > Discover All

On the discover page, you could see the link to custom connector inside the Data card.

On the New custom connector dropdown, select Create from blank.

Give a name for custom connector and in the wizard, enter the host and path to the projection in the General Information

 

Now it’s time to test the app in action!

Save, and Preview the app (F5). Change the layout to mobile to see the real feeling of your app 🙂

 

Once the app is completed, it’s possible to Publish and distribute to the other users in the organization.

Summary

By integrating IFS Cloud with Power Apps, you can unleash the potential of the Microsoft platform and build tailor-made applications for your organization and user requirements. Power Platform has over 600+ connectors if you need to couple with other systems and pre-built AI models to cater your unique business needs.

At Align Consulting, we are experts in leveraging the cutting-edge extendibility capabilities of IFS Cloud to seamlessly integrate with powerhouse platforms like Power Apps. We are there to help crafting bespoke, industry-grade applications that perfectly align with your unique business needs and fit for the future🚀.

Contact us today to learn more and embark on your innovation journey💡.

Contact Us – Align Consulting

By

Damith Jinasena

It has been over 8 months since I started my first cloud development, and it has been a nice journey with many new things to learn; challenges and new processes to adopt. Here is my retrospective experience and some useful tips, coming from me and my colleague Asbjörn Brekke, for those stepping into IFS Cloud development.

Things I liked most

Even though I worked with IFS developments for a considerable time, it was not an easy step for me to get things started since IFS Cloud development comes with a big technical leap and different tool set to adapt. But once the basic setup was done, I started to feel more comfortable since one big change in cloud development is that developers can work from the local workstation rather than a virtual desktop.

One thing I like about developing in IFS Cloud is the new web-based client framework. It gives much freedom to the developer to choose between different layouts, controllers, and design patterns. We can produce modern interfaces with rich user interface controllers in such a quick time in IFS Cloud.

Integration capabilities of IFS Cloud has been drastically improved and it’s nice to see that IFS is moving towards open standards. Hence, now we can think of many new ways of interacting with IFS through integrations.

Another plus point in IFS Cloud development is the use of git and Azure DevOps. We can do more collaborative developments, and it is possible to do unit testing in sandbox environments and identify errors before delivering to the customer. Therefore, my overall conclusion is I believe developers can deliver more quality products in IFS Cloud than in previous versions

Points for improvements

When writing this, it has been only four major releases made in IFS Cloud. Admittedly, I’m pretty impressed by the speed it evolved through that short period of time. However, I believe it has a long way to go as well.

Performance is one of the key areas which I believe should be improved in IFS Cloud. There are two folds of performance, user performance and data performance. As developers it’s our responsibility to consider the performance impact and use new design patterns for optimized user performance.  I do hope IFS will address the data performance problems which we’ve experienced on many occasions.

An area I experienced being difficult in IFS Cloud is debugging. Since most of the code is generated, a simple mistake could lead to errors, and it could take more effort for troubleshooting. Consequently, improved debugging capabilities would be helpful indeed.

Some Useful Tips

IFS Cloud has a future proof design and under the hood it carries lots of new capabilities and potential which were not there with older versions of IFS. Developing in IFS Cloud involves new thinking, and new learning. Here are some tips which I think will be useful to get the maximum benefits from IFS Cloud developments:

• Have a good design – Having a good design is the key to success in any development. When it comes to IFS Cloud, design plays a major role since then you can wisely decide which building blocks you need to use in early stage, since changing the core logic could be a heavy effort

 

• Think Evergreen – With IFS Cloud, IFS is moving towards an evergreen software concept. In a nutshell, that means IFS will release feature update releases twice a year, and frequent service updates. We must take that into consideration and try to avoid any developments which would disrupt IFS core logic. For example, sometimes we could provide a quick solution for a customer need by overtaking the IFS code, and the modifying it. But then, with each service or feature update, we would have to check our code and might need to do re-work to adopt to IFS changes. This would lead to high maintenance cost in the long run. Hence, we need to think smart and design our solutions to have minimal impact on the IFS core logic.

 

• Re-Use Existing code – IFS Cloud encourages making reusable code and it can be seen everywhere in IFS core developments. Most of the time you could find the needed pieces if you look carefully into how the developments are done. It could save a lot of time and effort and cope with the evergreen concepts.

Med IFS Cloud har IFS gitt kundene mulighet til å eie og lede utviklingen av egen IFS plattform og løsning inkludert konfigurasjoner og tilpasninger. Kunden eier utviklingen og bestemmer selv hvem som skal inviteres inn for å gjøre utvikling. Align har meget positive erfaringer med den nye åpne plattformen – IFS Cloud. Det blir en kortere implementeringssyklus fra idè til ferdig levert kode siden vi kan ivareta hele prosessen på vegne av kunden.

Korte livssykluser på utviklingsmiljø, hyppige leveranser og kort «time to market» for ny funksjonalitet krever god kontroll på grunndata, konfigurasjoner og tilpasninger. Det er også viktig å etterstrebe evergreenprinsippet, slik at risiko ved oppdateringer og releaser reduseres. Som funksjonelle og tekniske arkitekter i et IFS Cloud Prosjekt, ser vi dermed at mulighetsrommet i IFS Cloud øker kompetansebehovet på kundesiden.

 

Med IFS Cloud skjer utvikling raskt, som igjen krever en mer proaktiv tilnærming til både system og prosesser. Kjennskap til kundens forretningsprosesser og krav blir ekstremt viktig.

Vi anbefaler at våre kunder samarbeider med et kompetansehus som Align for bistand og hjelp i overgangen til IFS Cloud.

 

Birgitte Hanstad (løsningsarkitekt) og Kjetil Pedersen (teknisk arkitekt)

 

Ønsker du å vite mer – kontakt Erik!