An overview of document processing

Before you begin setting up the hub, it is helpful to review the components of WebSphere Business Integration Connect and how they are used to process documents.

Figure 2. The Receiver and Document Manager components

This illustration is an example of how a document is sent from a participant, received at the hub, processed at the hub, and sent to a Community Manager backend application.

A document is received into the WebSphere Business Integration Connect server by the Receiver component. The Receiver includes transport-specific targets. You set up a target for each type of transport the hub will support. For example, if participants are going to send documents over HTTP, you set up an HTTP target to receive them. As you will see in the section on Gateways, you set up a gateway for the transport type used to send the document from the hub to the Community Manager.

Figure 3. An HTTP target

If the Community Manager backend application is going to send documents over JMS, you set up a JMS target at the hub to receive them. You will also set up a gateway for the transport type used to send the document from the hub to the participant.

Figure 4. A JMS target

WebSphere Business Integration Connect supports a variety of transports, but you can also upload your own user-defined transport and use it when defining a target (as described in Setting up targets).

The Receiver sends the document to a shared file system. The Document Manager component retrieves the document from the file system and determines the routing information and whether any transformation is required. For example, the Community Manager might send an EDI-X12 document with no packaging to the hub, for delivery to a participant that is expecting the EDI-X12 document to include AS2 headers. The Document Manager adds the header information and then uses the gateway defined for the participant to send the document to its destination.

Copyright IBM Corp. 2003, 2004