Oracle E-Business Suite and Cleo integration

What moves between them

Outbound, ml-connector reads approved purchase orders and validated AP invoices from Oracle E-Business Suite open interface views and writes them as X12 850 and 810 files into the designated Cleo mailbox folder for routing to trading partners. Inbound, it retrieves EDI files Cleo received from partners, such as 855 acknowledgments or 856 ship notices, and stages the relevant ones into EBS open interface tables. Both directions run on a polling schedule, typically every few minutes, since neither system offers self-service push without administrator-configured middleware.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector authenticates to EBS by calling the login service for a session token cookie and re-authenticating on a 401 when the session times out, and it authenticates to Cleo with the OAuth password grant and refreshes the Bearer token on a 401. On each EBS read it pages the open interface view with limit and offset and a LAST_UPDATE_DATE filter, carrying the required ctx_orgid so multi-org data stays scoped to one operating unit. Each EBS purchase order or invoice is mapped to the X12 segments the trading partner expects and uploaded with a unique timestamped filename, because Cleo has no idempotency key and a duplicate filename would route twice. Inbound files are downloaded from the Cleo folder, parsed, and inserted into the matching EBS open interface table; a key gotcha is that the EBS POST only inserts an interface row, so the actual record is not created until the import concurrent program runs, which ml-connector triggers or confirms by polling the base table. ml-connector keeps concurrency low, two to four parallel calls, because EBS has no rate limiter and aggressive load degrades the shared on-premises instance, while staying under Cleo's roughly five requests per second per path limit.

A real-world example

A mid-size industrial distributor running Oracle E-Business Suite R12.2 with roughly 300 employees sells to several large retailers that mandate EDI. Today their AP and procurement teams rekey purchase orders from EBS into Cleo and manually file partner acknowledgments back into EBS, which is slow and produces mismatched documents. With this connection, EBS purchase orders and invoices flow out to Cleo as 850 and 810 files automatically, and inbound acknowledgments and ship notices are staged back into EBS, so the teams stop rekeying and partner documents stay aligned with the ERP.

What you can do

• •Reads approved purchase orders and validated AP invoices from Oracle E-Business Suite open interface views on a polling schedule.
• •Uploads those records into Cleo as outbound X12 850 and 810 files with unique filenames to prevent double-routing.
• •Retrieves inbound EDI files Cleo received from trading partners and stages them into the matching EBS open interface tables.
• •Bridges EBS Basic Auth and session tokens with Cleo's OAuth 2.0 Bearer tokens, refreshing each on expiry.
• •Scopes every EBS read to the correct operating unit org id and keeps concurrency low to protect the shared instance.

Questions

Does this use webhooks or polling?

It uses polling in both directions. Oracle E-Business Suite has no self-service webhooks; its Business Event System requires per-event administrator setup through Oracle middleware, so ml-connector reads open interface views filtered by LAST_UPDATE_DATE. Cleo's folder REST API is also pull-based, so ml-connector polls the mailbox folders to pick up files. Outbound push from Cleo is possible only if a Cleo admin configures it in CIC Studio.

Are invoices and POs native records in Cleo?

No. Cleo Integration Cloud is an integration platform, not a finance system, so invoices and purchase orders are not first-class REST resources. They move through Cleo as X12 EDI files, such as 810 for invoices and 850 for purchase orders, stored in folders. ml-connector formats the Oracle E-Business Suite data into those EDI files and reads inbound EDI files back out of the folders.

When ml-connector writes to Oracle E-Business Suite, is the record created immediately?

Not immediately. Most EBS writes are two-step: a REST POST inserts a row into an open interface table, and a separate import concurrent program must run to validate and create the actual record. A 200 response only confirms the interface row was inserted. ml-connector either triggers the import program or polls the base table to confirm the record was created.