Defining Intelligent Business Objects

Intelligent business objects are described in the Intelligent Business Objects section.

In order to define an intelligent business object the configurator has to click on the “Communication” property of a business object and define communication channels of the object in the “Communication Channels” dialog that comes up.

AwareIM supports the following types of communication channels out-of-the-box:

1. E-mail channel – //communication with an intelligent business object is via e-mail - //SOAP channel – communication with an intelligent business object is via Web services mechanism which supports SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
2. URL channel – communication with an intelligent business object is via HTTP URL (Unified Resource Locator)
3. REST channel – communication with an intelligent business object is via a popular REST protocol

In addition to the above pre-defined types it is possible to plug-in custom channel types – see “AwareIM Programmer’s Reference”.

A particular object may expose several communication channels at once – when a notification or service request are sent to the object it is possible to indicate which type of channel the request or notification should be sent through (see SEND and REQUEST SERVICE actions). Therefore the configurator has to indicate which channels the intelligent business object exposes.

Every channel has certain properties specific to its type. To set the properties of a channel tick the channel type in the “Communication Channels” dialog and define its properties.

When an e-mail channel is defined for a business object the Configuration Tool automatically adds the EmailAddress attribute to the business object. This attribute can be used to set the e-mail address of a particular instance of the business object in the Operation Mode. When the e-mail channel is removed from the business object the EmailAddress attribute is automatically removed as well.

To specify account settings for sending emails double-click on the business space version and select the Outgoing Emails property - see Sending Outgoing E-mails.

Before setting properties of the SOAP channel, check out documentation of the service provider to find out the location of a WSDL file. This file describes how to call the SOAP services exposed by the service provider. You need to enter the URL of this WSDL file into the SOAP Channel dialog. If location of this file is different at runtime, enter the Runtime URL of the WSDL file.

The next step is to discover web services offered through this channel. AwareIM will read information in the WSDL file to automatically figure out which services are exposed by the intelligent object.

To discover services press the Discover button next to the Services table. Discovered services (if any) will be displayed in the Services table. You can now define a process that would call the discovered services using the REQUEST SERVICE action of the AwareIM Rule Language.

<callout type=“primary” icon=“true” title=“note”> Business objects declared as service input and reply are automatically added to the business space version once you save the changes for the intelligent business object you are defining or editing.</callout>

<callout type=“primary” icon=“true” title=“note”> If the service provider changes definitions of services the services may be re-discovered in the same way as described above. The Configuration Tool will automatically replace all services and business objects declared as service input and replies with the new definitions.</callout>