ActivateBillingCycle collaboration template

This collaboration template is used to activate the billing cycle associated with a billing account and to communicate with billing account management systems.

ActivateBillingCycle uses the Generic BillingAccount Business Object to represent a billing account and the Generic BillingAccountList business object to represent a list of billing accounts.

This collaboration template uses the ProcessContext attribute of generic business objects to maintain process information between two or more collaboration objects. In order to maintain this information, the collaboration object performs the following actions, starting from when it receives a triggering business object:

Collaboration object setup

This section includes information on port bindings and required steps for setting up collaboration objects based on this collaboration template. For information on standard features, ports, and configuration properties for collaboration templates, and for general information on creating collaboration objects refer to the documents listed in Required documents for creating collaboration objects.

Port information

The following diagram illustrates ActivateBillingCycle's ports:

ActivateBillingCycle collaboration's ports

Note: To keep the collaboration object from using a port, bind that port to the Port connector. Doing so indicates that the port is unused without causing the collaboration object to provide additional functionality.

Port name: From
Business object Bound to Function Verbs used
BillingAccount WebSphere MQ Workflow Receives the triggering business object. At the end of a synchronous call, this port also returns the triggering business object to the source application when the collaboration object ends successfully. ActivateBillingCycle

Port name: To
Business object Bound to Function Verbs used
BillingAccountList Account management system Sends the triggering business object out of the collaboration object Update

Port name: DestinationAppRetrieve
Business object Bound to Function Verbs used
TelcoCustomerAccount Account management system Sends a reference-valued business object to retrieve the full-valued business object. The result contains an account which has the list of billing accounts for which to update the billing cycle information. Retrieve

Port name: SourceApp
Business object Bound to Function Verbs used
BillingAccount Account management system Retrieves the source data from the master application. When the collaboration object is used in a sync mode, where it receives only the key information from the From port, this port retrieves the source data from the master application, and synchronizes that data with other applications.

Note:
Since this port is closely related to SYNC_FROM_SOURCE property, see the SYNC_FROM_SOURCE property.
Retrieve

Port name: Return
Business object Bound to Function Verbs used
BillingAccount WebSphere MQ Workflow Returns the result of the process to an application before the collaboration object ends its process. This is typically used with WebSphere MQ Workflow connector to return the result of the business process to the WebSphere MQ Workflow activity.

Note:
Since this port is closely related to USE_RETURN property, see the USE_RETURN property.
Update

Setting up the collaboration object

To set up ActivateBillingCycle as a stand-alone collaboration object, complete the following steps:

  1. Create the ActivateBillingCycle collaboration object.
  2. Bind the ports as described in Port information.
  3. Set the configuration properties for ActivateBillingCycle.

Collaboration template processes

This section illustrates the following business processes for this collaboration template:

Overall process logic

This section illustrates this collaboration template's process logic for its supported verbs indicated below, as well as additional process logic that will be executed if the USE_RETURN or SYNC_FROM_SOURCE configuration property is set to true:

ActivateBillingCycle

The following diagram shows the process logic for this collaboration template's ActivateBillingCycle verb.

ActivateBillingCycle ActivateBillingCycle process logic

USE_RETURN

The following diagram shows the additional process logic that is executed when the collaboration object's USE_RETURN configuration property is set to true.

ActivateBillingCycle USE_RETURN process logic

SYNC_FROM_SOURCE

The following diagram shows the additional process logic that is executed when the collaboration object's SYNC_FROM_SOURCE configuration property is set to true.

ActivateBillingCycle SYNC_FROM_SOURCE  process logic

Standard business processes

This collaboration template uses the following standard business processes:

Compensation processing

IBM WebSphere InterChange Server provides the ability to roll back a transaction upon the failure of any step in the transaction. For example, when TelcoItemSync is a member of a collaboration object group, its process is one subtransactional step in a larger process. If any step fails in the collaboration object group's processes, IBM WebSphere Business Interchange Server allows you to roll back the processing of every collaboration object in the group.

When a TelcoItemSync collaboration object is used independently of other collaboration objects, its process comprises a single transactional step. In such a situation, it is not necessary to perform a rollback.

To cause a collaboration object or a collaboration object group to perform rollback requires modifying the collaboration template. To understand transaction processing by IBM WebSphere InterChange Server, see the Technical Introduction to IBM WebSphere InterChange Server. For information on adding transaction processing to the collaboration template, see the Collaboration Development Guide.

To extend the collaboration object to handle transaction processing, complete the following steps:

  1. Add this capability to the collaboration template and to every other collaboration template used in the collaboration object group.
  2. Set the minimum transaction level of the collaboration object and all members of the collaboration object group to a value higher than None. If a failure occurs in any subtransaction step, settings of Minimal Effort or higher cause the collaboration object and member collaboration objects in the group to execute compensation for Create, Update, and Delete operations performed on all business objects.
  3. Set the USE_RETRIEVE property of the collaboration object and all members of a collaboration object group to true. Forcing the collaboration objects to retrieve values before changing them allows the collaborations objects to restore the original values in an Update or Delete process.

Configuration properties

This section describes the following properties for this collaboration template:

Standard properties

This collaboration template uses the following standard configuration properties for collaboration templates:

Properties specific to this collaboration template

The following properties are specific to this collaboration template:

SYNC_FROM_SOURCE

This property specifies whether to retrieve the source data from the master application through the SourceApp port before sending the data to another application. When the triggering business object has only the key information, this property should be set to true.

SYNC_FROM_SOURCE configuration property
Possible values Usage
true Causes this collaboration object to retrieve the full-value business object and use it as triggering business object.
false (default value) Causes this collaboration object to use the triggering business object directly. In this case, the SourceApp port is bound to the Port connector.

USE_RETURN

This property specifies whether to return the processed business object through the Return port.

This property is required to handle cases where the user expects the process to return an output that is of a different type than the input. For example, the result of an asynchronous process may return an output that is different from the input that triggered the asynchronous process.

Note: Exceptions from USE_RETURN process are not handled as INFORMATIONAL_EXCEPTIONS, because the result is not considered to be informational.

USE_RETURN configuration property
Possible values Usage
true (default value) Causes this collaboration object to return the processed business object through the Return port after the completion of  processing. This is typically used when this collaboration object is called to return the result from the preceding asynchronous request. In this case, the Return port is typically bound to the same application as the one that is bound to the From port.
false Causes this collaboration object not to return through the Return port. In this case, the Return port is bound to the Port connector.

Copyright IBM Corp. 2002, 2003