Integrating Application and Data

Application integration involves exchanging of business data between CES and any external system or third party tool, like SAP on a real-time basis or snapshot of changes. Data integration is a bulk load of the same business data, which is performed much less frequently. Within the SIS framework, the exposed business data formats for integration are referred to as Business Data Definitions (BDD). The BDD encapsulates the CES properties and relationship information and hence, provides efficient and flexible way to define the business data within SIS.

SIS supports these types of event for BDD data exchanges:

  • Inbound
    • RequestInbound (Synchronous Add or Update)
    • ApplicationInbound (Asynchronous Add or Update)
    • DataImport (Bulk Data Load)
  • Outbound
    • RequestOutbound ( Synchronous Query)
    • ApplicationPublish (Asynchronous Query)
    • DataExport (Bulk Data Extraction)
    • ApplicationOutbound (CES based notification)

In all the exchange modes, SIS relies on the Common Infrastructure Services (CIS) infrastructure to communicate with external system or third party tools.

The SIS framework receives data or requests from CIS using the CIS Application Integrator or Data Integrator. Each CIS operation in the CIS Application Integrator or data transfer on the Data Integrator corresponds to an equivalent event in SIS. Each operation or data transfer will have an associated CIS metadata structure. That metadata structure will also directly correspond to the defined BDD within SIS.

For example,

The Organization BDD will have a CIS metadata definition and a corresponding CIS operation or data transfer for each type of event within SIS, such as SyncAddUpdateOrganization. This is one type of SIS event associated with a specific BDD (Organization). This is referred to as a service to Insert or update organization data synchronously.

Inbound Event

SIS associates a job with each load of data that comes from a CIS Event. Hence, each job will have a batch of records pertaining to only one BDD.

Each event goes through one or more stages before it is finally released into the production CES database. These stages might include custom validations, approval cycle, CES validations, and so on. These stages are called Services in SIS. Services can be user defined.

Hence, SIS can be configured in such a way that a sequence of services can be defined for every event. Services can be easily plugged into the workflow using simple configuration changes.

For inbound mode, the ReleaseService service is provided out of the box. This service provides CES validation and uploading into production CES database.

This diagram describes the Application Integration - Inbound Architecture:

Outbound Event

A batch of records for a given BDD can be exported out of the CES database and pushed out to the external system or third party using CIS.

Outbound supports two modes:

  • Notification
  • Query

Notification. Is an approach wherein based on certain type of triggers, data from the CES database is extracted and pushed out to CIS through the SIS. The data that gets pushed out corresponds to the appropriate BDD. The triggers for the Notifications are:

  • Using Send utility on a manually exported file.
  • Real time export of BDDs that have changed or modified. This is realized using CES Alerts.
  • Export on a definite interval of time using CES Timer agents.

This diagram describes the Outbound Notification:

Query. Is an implementation of Request-Reply. Request comes in from the CIS, SIS processes this request, uses the Export Service to fetch the appropriate data for the request, and finally returns the data as the reply. This is an asynchronous call, that is, the request to the reply is synchronous call.

This diagram describes the Outbound Query: