Getting Started with Magic xpi
Learn how to design, build, and deploy real integration projects with the Magic xpi Integration Platform. Seventeen hands-on lessons take you from your first flow to a production-ready solution.
Course outline
Each lesson builds on the previous one to construct a complete order-handling integration for a fictional company, MSU Computers Ltd. Lessons 1–6 include updated screenshots from Magic xpi 4.14.1.
Magic xpi Overview
Magic xpi Integration Platform delivers fast, simple integration and orchestration of business processes and applications. In this lesson you'll meet the Studio, get a feel for the moving parts of an integration project, and learn what to expect from the rest of the course.
Lesson 02Magic xpi Methodology
When you tackle a development project, defining a methodology saves time and catches problems early. This lesson introduces the recommended development methodology for Magic xpi — the same path the rest of this course follows.
Lesson 03Magic xpi Project
Time to roll up your sleeves. In this lesson you'll start the Magic xpi services, create a new project in the Studio, and tour the environment variables and project properties that every Magic xpi project ships with.
Lesson 04Resources
Before you can wire up an integration flow, you need to define the resources the project will talk to. This lesson explains how Magic xpi centralizes those definitions and walks you through creating your first mail-server resource.
Lesson 05Scan for New Requests
Now the analysis is done and the resources are ready. It's time to translate the business process into actual flows. In this lesson you'll meet the Flow Editor, build your first flow, and use the Directory Scanner and Email components.
Lesson 06Flow Orchestration
Flows transform data; that transformation needs a place to keep intermediate values and rules for choosing which step to run next. This lesson is about variables, expressions, and the orchestration logic that makes flows feel alive at runtime.
Lesson 07Checking Customer Existence
A central part of any integration project is data transformation. In Magic xpi the Data Mapper is the workhorse for that job. In this lesson you'll meet the Data Mapper, use it to extract details from a request XML, and check whether the customer exists in the local database.
Lesson 08The Runtime Environment
Up to now you've been running everything inside the Debugger. This lesson looks behind the curtain at what actually executes a deployed project — the Magic xpi Server — and at the Magic Monitor dashboard you'll use to track its activity.
Lesson 09Testing Your Project
Before promoting a project to production you have to know it works. Magic xpi ships two tools for the job: the Checker, which audits your configuration, and the Debugger, which lets you walk a live flow step by step. This lesson tours both.
Lesson 10Item Validity Check
Once a request is in the system you have to validate the items it asks for. This lesson introduces the Flow Data utility, the Magic xpi ODS, and the Call Flow destination — three tools that together let you check stock for any number of line items in a single request.
Lesson 11Services
Resources let other systems talk to Magic xpi; services let Magic xpi expose itself to other systems. This lesson introduces the Services section of the Settings dialog, walks you through creating an HTTP service, and explains what an endpoint is.
Lesson 12Checking Request Status
Some integrations need a human in the loop. This lesson teaches you how to trigger a flow externally, build a dynamic HTML response, and use Magic xpi templates to merge data into a response page — the building blocks of a human-intervention process.
Lesson 13Error Handling
An integration application has very little control over the systems it depends on. Errors are inevitable; what matters is how you detect, report, and recover from them. This lesson covers Magic xpi's three layers of error handling — the step, the flow, and the dedicated error flow.
Lesson 14Adding a Customer
Web services are the universal language of inter-application communication. In this lesson you'll publish Magic xpi as a Web service provider so the outside world can ask it to add a customer — the missing piece in the human-intervention scenario you started in Lesson 12.
Lesson 15Handling Approved Requests
Magic xpi's Publish & Subscribe (PSS) system lets one part of a project fire an event and any number of other flows react to it — without the publisher having to know who's listening. This lesson uses PSS to ship approved requests to delivery.
Lesson 16Automatic Item Check
Some requests stay invalid for a while — stock isn't on the shelf, the price is too low, the customer hasn't been added yet. This lesson teaches you to schedule a periodic re-check and introduces the Flow Enablement feature for time-windowed flows.
Lesson 17More About Magic xpi
This final lesson collects everything that didn't fit elsewhere — the rules behind the Data Mapper, the XML interface for components, flat-file mapping, and User Defined Storage (UDS). It's the reference chapter you'll come back to as your projects grow.
Before you begin
A few things to have ready on your machine.
Familiarity with
Relational databases (tables, rows, fields, indexes), XML, and basic HTML.
Workstation
Windows 10/11, 8 GB RAM or more, ~5 GB free disk space, 1280×800 display or larger.
Microsoft SQL Server
SQL Server 2016 or later (Express works). You'll need a login with appropriate privileges.
IIS
A local IIS instance for the HTTP-trigger and web-service exercises.
Magic xpi 4.14.1
An IBNPSRV evaluation license — request one from your local Magic Software representative.
Mail server & client
An SMTP/IMAP account (your own works) plus a mail client to verify the messages your flow sends.