The State of New JDE Releases for 2024

Oracle announced a number of new functionalities for JDE Orchestrator recently. Since these improvements are of interest to our JDE clients, we are providing our take on the most impactful enhancements and how you might use them to streamline workflows.

Introducing Stateful Orchestrations

The most compelling new feature provides a framework for persisting the state of orchestrations between sessions. This means you can now create a “snapshot” of all relevant data at a given point and reactivate an orchestration at a later time. 

Stateful orchestrations can tolerate time gaps in processing and be programmed for synchronous behaviors. For example, an orchestration can pause for external systems to respond and easily start/stop between steps. Before this feature update, orchestrations were stateless. Upon execution, the orchestration would run from start to finish with no option for interruption and resumption. There were workarounds in creating workflows, but they were cumbersome. This stateful function solves the problem. 

How It Works:

• When a stateful orchestration reaches a “pause” step in its sequence, it inserts a record into the table in JDE as a unique session ID, and tells you that the sequence is paused.
  
  
• When you call the orchestration again, you can use the same session ID and it will pick up where it last stopped.
  
  
• You can add multiple stop points, and call the same orchestration different times to resume and pause each session separately as many times as you want.
  
  
• Even nested pauses and rules are possible with stateful orchestrations (although that level of complexity is rarely needed).

When Is Stateful Useful?

Stateful orchestrations are helpful when you want to take offline tasks and inject these manual tasks into the process. For example, you might submit a PO, send an email to a third party for approval, then kick off the orchestration again after approval.

It was possible to do something similar with notifications in the past, but that involved multiple orchestrations linked to a PO number and there was no central way to track where the process was. For example, you would need an orchestration to send the message, an independent orchestration to approve/reject/review, and then have the user pass in the PO#. Now, you can pause and then continue a single existing process instead of building multiple orchestrations. 

Additional Orchestrator Updates

File Discovery for Orchestrator FTP Connector

This is a feature users have been requesting for many years, so we are glad to see it on the latest release list. Now, you have the ability to connect to the FTP server, retrieve a list of all the files in the directory and read/iterate over all the files automatically. This works even if a file name changes or is “not known.” 

Create a Table from a Data Set in a Message

This is a feature similar to one we built for a client who needed AP remittance emails to look nicely formatted. You can read about that project here. It required a lot of custom HTML to make it work. That was a 20 hour project to build something that now takes seconds with this enhancement in JDE’s new release. 

This means if you have a data set, you can pass it into a notification or message and it will create a nicely formatted table for you.  Before, you could only pass in and format a single row or you could pass in the full data set but it would NOT be formatted in any useful way without extensive custom scripting. Now, your formatted tables will look more professional in emails and notifications without any coding. 

Reorder Orchestration Inputs

This is another long-awaited feature, but there is a reason it wasn’t high on the priority list. The order of inputs doesn’t matter for JSON when making a REST call. But when you are dealing with 3rd party applications, it’s nice to be able to change the order and have it reflect automatically. There is now a drag and drop interface (like on Form Requests) that is easy to use and creates a better user experience when interfacing with external systems that are sensitive to the order of inputs.

There are a few more new features, but most won’t impact your day-to-day use of Orchestrator. 

If you need a custom orchestration built or a project to discuss, book a time here.