Interactions with connectors and applications

Through its ports, a collaboration interacts with connectors, with the Access Interface, and with other collaborations. The collaboration receives its trigger, sends requests, and gets responses through these ports. These are translated to and from application operations.

Using the scenario shown in Figure 23 as a simple example, Figure 24 shows how the collaboration drives operations throughout the in a publish-and-subscribe interaction. Figure 24 shows only a single execution path, the path that is taken if the destination application does not yet contain information about the employee. The shaded arrow paths in Figure 24 show the translations that Connector B makes as it transfers collaboration requests into requests to the application API and transfers application responses into its own responses to the collaboration.

Figure 24. Processing at runtime


In this figure, the representation of a connector includes both the connector agent and connector controller functions.

Figure 24 illustrates the following process:

  1. When Application A creates a new employee record, Connector A retrieves it.
  2. Connector A creates an Employee.Create business object and sends this event notification to the collaboration, where its arrival triggers the start of this scenario.
  3. The scenario checks to see whether the employee information is really new by trying to retrieve information on the same employee from the destination application. To do so, the scenario sends a Employee.Retrieve request to Connector B.
  4. Connector B tries to retrieve the employee information, but learns that the employee does not exist in Application B. The connector returns a failure status to the collaboration.
  5. Now the scenario proceeds to send the Employee.Create request. When Connector B receives the Employee.Create request, it uses Application B's API to create the new employee.
  6. Connector B returns a success status to indicate that the operation succeeded.
  7. The scenario receives the success status and ends.

Copyright IBM Corp. 1997, 2004