Today, we are happy to announce the release of IBM i (AS/400) Connector for the MuleSoft Anypoint platform. In response to the feedback from our customers and prospects, we added support for calling Service Program Procedures and the ability to define an external format for data queue entries. These enhancements further reduce or eliminate the back-end development for integrating the IBM i (AS/400) based applications into the modern application landscape. The new features are released for both Mule 3 and Mule 4 versions of the Connector.
Service Program Procedure Call
IBM i (AS/400) Service Programs are collections of procedures and exported data elements that can be used by other back-end programs. Service Programs are a great way to encapsulate and reuse the same business logic in the traditional IBM i development environments. MuleSoft developers can now call Service Program procedures directly from Mule flows without a need to write a wrapper program, making it easier to expose the back-end business logic as an API.
External Format for Data Queue Operations
Data Queues are lightweight native IBM i (AS/400) objects used for asynchronous inter-process communications. Data Queue message entry is a byte array element. On the IBM i (AS/400) side, it is possible to work with Data Queue entries as externally defined data structures, where each entry is a collection of fields and their respective elements. The latest release of the connector allows specifying the external format table on data queue operations. When provided, the data queue entry format will be dynamically defined based on that table, and the connector will perform the data type conversion, supporting most data types. This feature makes it easier and faster to develop outbound (IBM i to MuleSoft) integrations that leverage Data Queues or our Web Transaction Framework.
For more information please refer to the Connector page on MuleSoft Anypoint Exchange.
In the coming weeks, we will walk through each feature in more detail and provide sample projects. We are always happy to hear from you – please provide your feedback or tell us if you would like to see other features in the upcoming releases.
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