Overview of back-end integration

With Business Integration Connect, you exchange business documents with your community participants. The purpose of exchanging these documents is to communicate information, which typically involves processing data and returning a result. When you receive data from a community participant, processing of that data generally occurs in the back-end system of your enterprise. WebSphere Business Integration Connect is the point within the hub community through which messages to and from the enterprise are routed.

For communication with the enterprise, the following components of the trading community are involved:

The enterprise is accessed through a back-end system to which Business Integration Connect connects. All editions of Business Integration Connect provide the ability to connect to back-end systems. These editions differ in the transport protocols they can support, as follows:

Documents exchanged between the community participant and Business Integration Connect can be in a variety of formats, in addition to RosettaNet. Documents can be in the SOAP, cXML, XML, EDI, or binary formats. The Administrator Guide has a complete list of the document types supported as well as the transport protocols (for example, HTTP) that can be used to send the documents.

Consider the following example--a community participant sends a RosettaNet-formatted purchase order, intended for the Community Manager, to the appropriate target on Business Integration Connect (Enterprise or Advanced edition). The Community Manager has a back-end system that processes purchase orders and expects to receive the orders in RosettaNet Service Content (RNSC) format. When the connection between the community participant and Community Manager is established, it is agreed that:

The back-end system can then process the document.

Documents that can be exchanged between Business Integration Connect and the back-end system of the Community Manager as well as the transport types associated with the documents are shown in Table 15 and Table 20..

Figure 1 illustrates how Business Integration Connect uses the back-end integration interface to communicate with the back-end system at the Community Manager. Note that the arrows go in both directions; that is, the document can originate from the back-end system of the Community Manager.

Figure 1. The role of the business protocol and packaging in the flow of documents


Copyright IBM Corp. 2003, 2004