Architectural Overview - Sterling B2B Integrator

A service is a set of instructions that the Business Process Engine uses to perform an activity in a business process. Adapters are services that connect the Business Process Engine and other system components to dissimilar systems and applications outside of the Sterling B2B Integrator environment.

Business processes can send, pause, retrieve, and fully interact with adapters.

Services and adapters are reusable—you can include them in multiple business process models.

Understanding Services and Adapters

Sterling B2B Integrator includes numerous services. Some are internal system services, while most are external and can be configured by users. Configurable services can be used in business processes for activities such as running pre-existing programs, ERP systems, Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) scripts, Java code, decision engines, defined subprocesses, or virtually any program. The interface includes wizard-driven configuration and deployment steps to make the setup simple.

Input and output services are generally called adapters. The adapters connect to systems and applications outside of the Sterling B2B Integrator environment. Adapters can listen for remote calls and then start the business processes. They can be used to start business processes or at any point in the business process.

Another type of input/output service is a human interaction service. Human interaction services enable humans to interact with a business process; for example, using a Web browser to approve data as a step in a business process.

For a list of the functional types of services and adapters in Sterling B2B Integrator, see Service and Adapters Category List.

Standards, Foreign Language, and Data Type Support

Sterling B2B Integrator services are developed using industry-accepted specifications for data formats, communication protocols, workflow modeling, and security in order to maximize interoperability between systems and trading partners.

Because Sterling B2B Integrator is built on a Java code base, and Java supports Unicode, which is a universal character-encoding scheme for written characters and text, the programs with which your processes will interact can be written in nearly any language. Virtually any file-based, message-based, or stream-based data type are also supported.

Adapters

Adapters either receive input from or provide output to outside systems. Adapters provide noninvasive integration with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), other packaged applications, enterprise applications, communication protocols, messaging solutions such as IBM WebSphere®, and databases.

The following process summarizes the way adapters work within a business process:

1. The business process progresses to the application adapter step.
2. The adapter calls a third-party application to perform an activity.
3. The system records the modified state (context) of the process and related data.
4. The business process continues to the next service or adapter.

Service and Adapters Category List

Sterling B2B Integrator is flexible and enables you to determine what activities to configure as a service, a business process, or a subprocess. For instance, you could implement ebXML support in the form of multiple activities linked together in a business process, or write a single service. This flexibility ensures that you can easily adapt to new requirements.

You can create business process models by using drag-and-drop technology in the Graphical Process Modeler (GPM). The GPM depicts the services that you include in your business process models by using icons. Each icon translates into multiple lines of code.

Business process models define how the Business Process Engine executes the activities in a business process. Creating business process models for the system to follow is the central activity around which your operations are based on.

You can drag icons from a pallet of options representing the services and BPML constructions (such as choices, start and stop, and so on) that you require on to the workspace in order to create your business process model. When you save the business process model, the GPM converts the graphical representation into well-formed and valid Business Process Modeling Language (BPML).

For information about how the Business Process Engine runs business processes, see Business Process Engine.

Examples of GPM

The following figure shows GPM icons representing the beginning and end points of a business process model:

The following figure shows some of the GPM icons representing specialized services:

In the GPM interface, a simple business process model might look like this:

The following is an example of a more complicated process depicted in the GPM:

You can reuse an entire process model or a part of it to create new or modified versions of existing models.

Business processes can start other processes and link to subprocesses.

Sterling B2B Integrator manages data translation and transformation of complex flat files that are in positional, fixed length, and variable-length delimited formats, supporting both standard and extended rules.

It translates data according to the instructions you provide in the form of translation maps, which you create and manage using the Map Editor tool. A translation map specifies how data in one format relates to data in another format.

From a technical perspective, translation services perform run-time translation based on the translation maps you have created, using translation objects and XML encoder objects to translate data from one format to another.

The translation objects (files with a .txo extension) and XML encoder objects (files with an .ltx extension) are the compiled translation maps.

You can create, modify, and compile translation maps using the Map Editor tool. The Map Editor is an offline, Windows-based program that you download from Sterling B2B Integrator. It includes preloaded standards and provides flexibility in mapping complex data transformations.

The Map Editor is built on software from the proven IBM® Sterling Gentran® product line. Customers familiar with the IBM Sterling Gentran Map Editor do not require re-training.

Translation Maps in Sterling B2B Integrator

Using the Map Editor, you can create data transformation maps for the system to use at run time. You can then include the appropriate translation map and related services in your business process models to configure run-time translation activities.

The Map Editor provides tools that allow you to migrate or convert maps from the IBM Sterling Gentran for Windows, IBM Sterling Gentran for UNIX, IBM Sterling Gentran for iSeries, and IBM Sterling Gentran for zSeries® products.

The following figure is an example of a translation map in the Map Editor:

Trading Partner Code Lists

Using the Map Editor, you can create code lists. A code list is a list of values for a field and their corresponding descriptions that you can include in a translation map. You can associate a rule in a translation map so that the system either checks values against the code list or selects a value from the specified list. For example, you can cross-reference a list of internal codes, such as item codes, with corresponding codes from a trading partner. At run time, a map can look up the codes and map the internal item code to an external partner's code or the reverse.

Without this code list capability, you would have to create such cross-reference functionality using an extended rule, a user exit in an extended rule, or some other custom processing outside of the translation service.

XML Transformation Components

The following figure shows the XPath Expression Builder:

 

Adapting to Increasing XML Demand