Build an integration service when you want a flow to interact
with an external system.
Before you begin
To perform this task, you must be in the IBM® Process
Designer desktop
editor.
To create services, you must have
access to a process application or toolkit in the Process Center repository.
Access to process applications and toolkits is controlled by users
who have administrative rights to the repository. For more information,
see Managing access to the Process Center repository.
About this task
For example, you may want users to choose from a list
of products available from a common site on the internet. In that
case, you can build an Integration service that calls a web service
to display the list of options. Integration services are the only
services that can include Web Service Integration and Java Integration
components as well as content integration. For more information about
inbound and outbound integrations, see Integrating with web services, Java and databases.
Procedure
- Open the Process Designer desktop editor.
- Open a process application in the Designer view.
- In New Service,
enter a name for the service and click Finish. IBM Process
Designer displays
the diagram of the service with the default Start Event and End Event
components.
- Select the Variables tab, and add
the variables that your integration service will use as input or output
and also add private variables that the service will use. See Declaring variables for a BPD or a service in Process Designer for information.
- Select the Diagram tab, and add
the appropriate components to the service and then connect the components
to create the flow. For information about the components
that you can add to the diagram, see Service components in Process Designer.
In particular, add one or more of the following components:
Tip: You can also use the Invoke UCA component for
integration. See
Undercover agents.
- Configure the components in the flow. For the integration
components listed in the previous step, configure them so that they
interact with the external system. In particular, for the Web Service
Integration, Java Integration, Content Integration, and nested service
components, map the data used in the task flow to the input and output
for the component:
- Click the Data Mapping option
in the properties. Because you already created the input
and output variables for the nested service, the Data Mapping tab
includes these variables.
- From the Input Mapping section, you can map each variable
using one of the following ways:
- Use to suggest mappings. If the automatic mapper
does not find a variable, you can create a private variable for the
mapping.
- Use and then
select the appropriate variable.
- In the Output Mapping section,
do similar mappings for the output variables.
- If you want the results of the service to be cached for
unique combinations of input parameter values, enable and configure
the service result cache.
- Select the Overview tab, then
in the Service Result Cache section, select Enable
caching of service results. The cache configuration fields
are displayed.
Restriction: The
service result cache setting works only for top-level services that
are called directly. If a service is called within another service,
the cache setting does not apply.
- By default, when caching is enabled, the results for
each combination of input parameter values are kept in the cache for
12 hours. To change the caching period, in the Cache results
for section, use the Days, Hours, Minutes,
and Seconds fields to select the duration that
you want.
Important: You might be able to improve
the performance of some services by using the cache, however you must
take care when you decide how long to cache results for, and might
need to tune the size of the cache to avoid memory problems. By default,
the cache stores up to 4096 results. You can change the size of the
cache by setting a different value for <service-result-cache-size> in
the 100Custom.xml file, inside the <server
merge="mergeChildren"> section.
Example
See the integration services included in the System Data
(TWSYS) toolkit for implementation examples.