We use an integration middleware with Solace for nearly all our application integrations. This means events are not published or consumed directly by applications but rather flow through our integration middleware before reaching the intended application.
However, in Designer, it’s not currently possible to represent this middleware as an application since applications cannot be directly connected to each other on the canvas.
Additionally, we have use cases where an API management platform receives a client request, forwards the request body to a storage facility, and then raises an event for any interested destination systems to retrieve the body from storage.
While this might extend beyond the intended scope of Designer, it would be valuable to have a way to represent these middleware components and processing stages within the Event Portal. This would allow us to capture the entire integration landscape rather than just event-specific details.
Great suggestion @leonard - and very timely! The Event Portal team is working to deliver a few enhancements to Event Portal exactly along those lines. Specifically:
The ability to have customized icons in the graph so that you can have an icon visually representing your middleware (what we’d call a micro-integration) different from your end application. So you can have an SAP CI or Mule or Boomi or… middleware icon that is different from your source/destination system
The ability to connect non-eventing applications to an eventing application - meaning your source/destination systems can be shown on the graph connected (often via an API) to the middleware
These will give you the ability to see the e2e view you mention above with better visuals to easily understand the overall architecture. I think the API data storage scenario you mention should also be covered by these changes.
Watch for the announcement of the availability of these in the Notification section of the Console sometime in May.
Hi @leonard , I’m the Product Manager for Event Portal here at Solace. Our UX designers are about to conduct a usability / ease of use study regarding designing the event interface for publishing and consuming applications in Event Portal, including deploying the associated configurations for those applications to the Solace brokers. So these application interface definitions would correspond to your Integration Middleware in the event flow you described above. I was wondering if you would like to participate in this study? It would take about an hour.
We could show you a preview of the link apps to apps in the graph that Shawn mentioned above.
