EPM Groovy RestAPI vs Groovy EPMAutomate for Data Loading

Lately I have been doing a lot more EPM Data Integration work.  I have been trying to move to more server side automation using Groovy in Business Rules to replace on-premises EPMAutomate scripts for most of my data loads.  

Here is link to documentation.

Before this was available, there was and still is the ability to call REST APIs to invoke actions within EPM.

Here is link to documentation.

One of the reasons I like using server side automation, is that it puts the responsibility of loading data back in the hands of the Business user. 

From a developer and development perspective Groovy and EPMAutomate I believe is easier and has less steep learning curve over Groovy and REST API. Additionally you can do same action with a lot less code using Groovy and EPMAutomate over REST API.

Here is example of running data integration with REST API.

One thing about REST API. There are 2 main commands used. POST sends action to request to remote server.  GET gets status or response of the POST.  So after you send POST you need another bit of code to check if the requested action of the POST has finished and if it was successful or was an error.  So you need a block of code like the following:

 

Now with EPMAutomate, it is different.  The framework behind the scenes has a wait, so all that is needed is to collect the status of the execution.

 

 

And by using a function logging is cleaner

Each approach has their merits and use cases, however with the introduction Groovy rules being able to run EPMAutomate commands the development time and lines of code are greatly reduced.