Associated document

Each business protocol can involve a sequence of one or more business document flows that can be related or associated to each other. For example, in cXML a given request document can have multiple asynchronous responses. WebSphere Partner Gateway provides the capability to view associated documents. The document viewer for WebSphere Partner Gateway displays all the business documents that flow through the system. If a particular document has associated documents, they are displayed in the associated document section of the document viewer. A document can have one or more associated documents.

Note: A synchronous response for a given document is considered an associated document. Synchronous responses are also displayed in the associated document section of the document viewer.

If the business protocol has the concept of associated documents, you can use user exits to provide information to WebSphere Partner Gateway so that for a given business document, the WebSphere Partner Gateway document viewer can display associated documents in the associated document section. The user exits need to have their own mechanism to determine whether the business document which they are currently processing is associated with any other business document flow. If it is, a user exit can set one of the following attributes on the business document:

These attributes can be set in handlers of the workflow steps or in the steps of the actions. After executing the flow for this business document, WebSphere Partner Gateway will see whether any of these attributes are set. If they are, WebSphere Partner Gateway updates WebSphere Partner Gateway activity logs so that the document viewer can display the association correctly, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 15. Document Details window displaying associated documents
Document Details window displaying associated documents

Copyright IBM Corp. 2003, 2005