Overview of document processing

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

Figure 5. The Receiver and Document Manager components
This figure shows how a document flows from the participant to the Receiver to a shared file system, where the Document Manager retrieves it, processes it, and sends it to the Community Manager back-end system

Figure 5 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 back-end application.

Note: For purposes of illustration, the drawings in this document show one Receiver and one Document Manager, installed on the same server machine. (Not shown is the third component, the Console, which is the interface to WebSphere Partner Gateway.) You can, in fact, have multiple occurrences of these components, and they can be installed on different servers. All components must use the same common file system. See the Installation Guide for information about the different topologies that can be used to set up WebSphere Partner Gateway.

A document is received into WebSphere Partner Gateway by the Receiver component. The Receiver is responsible for monitoring transports for inbound documents, retrieving the documents that arrive, performing some basic processing on them, and then queueing them so that the Document Manager can retrieve them.

Receivers are transport-specific. Instances of transport-specific receivers are known as 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.

Figure 6. An HTTP target
This figure shows how a document is received by a transport-specific target (HTTP, in this illustration)

If the Community Manager back-end application is going to send documents over JMS, you set up a JMS target at the hub to receive them.

Figure 7. A JMS target
This figure shows how a document from the Community Manager back-end system is received by a transport-specific target (JMS, in this illustration).

As described in Overview of transports, WebSphere Partner Gateway supports a variety of transports, but you can also upload your own user-defined transport to define a target (as described in Setting up a target for a user-defined transport).

The Receiver sends the document to a shared file system. For multiple documents that are in a single file (for example, XML or ROD documents or EDI interchanges sent together), the target splits the documents or interchanges before sending them to the 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 None packaging to the hub, for delivery to a participant that is expecting the EDI-X12 document with AS2 packaging. The participant provides the HTTP URL where the AS2-packaged document should be delivered, and the Document Manager packages the document as expected by the participant. The Document Manager uses the configuration of the gateway for that participant (which must have been set up for the HTTP URL where the participant expects to receive AS2 documents) to send the document to the participant.

Copyright IBM Corp. 2003, 2005