Rather than importing to another ICS instance, we are going to apply a change that is simple to spot and then import the integration back into the same environment. In the rest of this section, we are going to make the changes to the integration you have already downloaded.

When making changes this way, we should think of it as opening up a black box. Oracle makes no guarantees about the content and structure of the .iar files. They do recognize that, at times, a desktop application such as JDeveloper may be better suited to performing the development of very complex mappings and transformations; editing this way can be achieved because ICS has been built making use of industry standards such as XSL. To help in these cases, Oracle have put into the files XML comments such as:

< -User Editing allowed BELOW this line - DO NOT DELETE
  THIS LINE-->

So, you can see where changes may be applied, but we would advise being careful before making changes (that is, make a backup of our .iar file before making any modifications to return to if everything goes wrong). We would suggest when you first open up the .iar file that you explore the file contents. Within the resources part of the folder tree, you will find XSL files with the mappings we have previously defined.

Having taken the appropriate precaution of making an unmodified .iar, we can edit the .iar file. With any form of zip capable tool will be sufficient - WinZip or 7-Zip if you are using a Windows platform and p7zip for Linux and Mac users.

Within the .iar file, we want to edit the project.xml file; it should be located in icspackageproject<integrationame>_<version number>PROJECT-INF (where integration name will represent the integration exported and its current version number). The content of this file should look familiar to you, as it relates back to the new integration panel you will have seen before. For example, the projectDescription element will match the project description you will have given the integration process. For simplicity, go ahead and change the description (and remember the content has to be valid XML). Once the file has been changed, replace the existing project.xml with your new one in the .iar file.

Before we progress, it is worth also noting that the .iar file also contains the information about the connections needed. These can be found in the icspackage/appinstances folder. If you examine any of the XML files describing the connection, you will see that there are no credentials or properties of interface, such as the WSDL directly. But there is sufficient information for ICS to tell you about the connection name and the location of the WSDL (if it is a SOAP based endpoint).

We can now import the modified integration back into ICS, which we will walk through in the next section.