HCL Enterprise Integrator ( HEI )

Domino Enterprise Integrator is a very powerful add-in to HCL Domino that lets you integrate with other applications such as SQL, SAP etc. We are now using it to connect to SAP as part of a HCL Nomad deployment ( another impressive HCL system that I will blog more about )

HEI ( formerly LEI ) had previously been out of our price range but it is now bundled with HCL Domino Leap ( Low code platform for Domino ) and this makes it a very interesting option. It also gives us the opportunity to look a bit more at Leap too. The default connectors with Domino Leap include DB2, Notes, ODBC,OLE DB, Oracle, Sybase and Metaconnection. SAP is a separate install. Anyway, the point of this post is to point out one, or possibly two, gotchas when installing the SAP connector for HEI

Gotcha 1 – You need to install SAP software on the Domino Server

While most of the HEI documentation is very good the need to install either SAP software, or at the very least, some SAP RFC SDK dlls is not clearly explained in the Windows install. It is set out in the UNIX prerequisites. It is also mentioned in this tech note Is SAP 2.0.1 connector supported on Domino 10? (hcltechsw.com).  If you live in the land of SAP this may be obvious but it wasn’t to us.

HCL support identified this issue very quickly and we resolved the issue by adding the required six dlls . Note that the versions may vary between releases and 32/64 bit installations.
These may also be available by installing a SAP client of some sort but we dropped these dlls into C:\Windows\System32\

librfc32u.dll
libsapucum.dll
icudt34.dll
icuin34.dll
icuuc34.dll
librfc32.dll

Possible Gotcha 2 – Do not set Debug to 1

This is a possible gotcha because although we could reproduce it 100%, HCL could not.

Every time we tried to make the initial connection to SAP to retrieve the table names the 12.02 Domino server would crash.
We were using the same configuration from a LEI 9 installation that worked previously. We could replicate this 100% on Domino 12.02, 12.01 and 11.01

After much trial and error, including impressive support desk commitment from HCL, it was narrowed down to a “1” in the Debug Level field on the connection document.
With a 1 the server crashed, with a 0 it did not. HCL could not reproduce this but I thought that it would be worth mentioning here. HCL seemed to thing the CacheExecutor process was involved.

Other Notes

• It is well worth reading the documentation which is mostly very good.
• To illustrate the above the HEI installation is unlike Domino other add-in installations – the server must be running the whole time.
• There are some settings on the server ID that need to be changed – see “Establishing access rights in the Notes ID file” / “Don’t prompt for a password from other Notes programs”
• We found it worked best with the server run as an application rather than a service.
• HCL support ( technical and presales ) were very diligent with 98 email exchanges and 3 screen shares over 17 days supporting an important project