Document Receiving

Documents enter the hub processing system through components known as receivers. Receivers are responsible for monitoring transports for inbound documents, retrieving the documents that arrive, performing some basic processing on them, and then placing them in a storage queue from which the main processing engine can retrieve them.

Receivers are transport-specific. WBI Connect ships with receivers designed to handle FTP/S, JMS, File, SMTP, and HTTP/S transports. Version 4.2.2 also includes an API so that users can develop their own receivers, based on their specific needs.

To be of use, receivers are associated with transport configurations called targets. A target designates the URI of an entry point for documents coming into Business Integration Connect. It specifies a repository location from which the Document Manager is to retrieve documents. Each target supports documents sent using a single transport type. If multiple document formats are supported, there may be one target for each type per given transport. Targets are configured through the Community Console, a GUI-based control component of WBI Connect. A user developed receiver can have one or more targets in the same manner as a provided receiver does. For more information on using the Console to configure targets and associate them with receivers, see the Hub Configuration Guide.

In addition to adding completely new receivers, users of Connect 4.2.2 are able to develop user exit plugin modules to customize how receivers process incoming documents. These modules are called handlers. There are three places in the receiver processing sequence where user exit handlers can be called to do additional processing: pre-processing, sync check, and post-processing. At each of these places, also called configuration points, the user can use the Console to specify one or more handlers. For this release, user designed receivers and the WBI-C provided HTTP receiver are the only ones that support adding handlers.

Pre-processing handlers are used to perform any necessary pre-processing of documents before they are sent to the Document Manger, where main processing takes place. For example, in some situations multiple records may be sent in one wrapper message. Pre-processing could separate the individual messages from each other before they are sent on for actual processing.

Document transmission can be synchronous or asynchronous. In synchronous, or sync, transmission, the initiating partner expects a document in response to the one it transmits. In asynchronous, or async, transmissions, no response document is expected (although some simple information, such as an HTTP status code, may be returned). A user exit can be used to process the checking of documents for sync status with specialized handlers. WBI-C ships with two default sync check handlers, DefaultSynchronousSyncCheckHandler and DefaultAsynchrounousSyncCheckHandler, but users can supply their own. This is particularly useful in the case of some document types in which defining separate sync and async targets - using different handlers - can increase through-put.

Post-processing handlers are used to deal with the response documents that WBI-C returns to initiating partners when a sync request has been made.

Copyright IBM Corp. 2003, 2004