IBM WebSphere Business Integration Adapter How the connector works, Processing subscriptions

Component	Description
CIS server	Integration container which handles operation invocations. Integration
	container and CIS server are used interchangeably in this document.

How the connector works

The i2 connector is a CIS (Common Integration Services) client. It connects to the CIS client API in a non-managed environment, that is, it connects to the CIS adapter directly without an application server. No authentication is necessary (no user name or password is required). At present, the CIS client API does not support any connection pooling mechanism. Hence, connections are created for every transaction. For information on configuration properties, see “Configuring the connector” on page 8.

The i2 connector is bi-directional. It can process events originating from i2 applications, as well as requests sent by the broker to the application.

For event subscriptions, the i2 connector uses the information in the i2 metaobjects. It registers the operations on the types specified in these metaobjects with i2’s CIS agent. CIS agent listens to the registered operations and detects event messages only for registered operations. The i2 connector obtains these messages with the poll call.

For request processing, the i2 connector processes the requests coming from the integration broker by transforming incoming business objects into CIS records and using the appropriate CIS Client API calls to execute the operation on the i2 application modules.

The i2 connector follows the metadata design principles outlined in the IBM Connector Developer’s Guidelines. This means new IBM business objects can be defined without additional coding or customization at the i2 connector code level. For more information, see Chapter 3, “Understanding business objects for the connector”, on page 11.

Processing subscriptions

The following sections describe how the connector processes application events.

Event detection and notification

Events for the purpose of this document are the CIS messages published from the i2 application modules. The i2 application notifies the connector of all the events occurring in the modules for which corresponding operations have been registered with the CIS agent.

The onus of registering the operations of interest lies with the i2 connector.

Example: If the i2 connector is interested in the Bidding type operation addBid, any new Bidding additions to the i2 application module will be queued in the CIS server once the i2 connector registers for the addBid operation.

The i2 connector uses the information in the i2 metaobjects. It registers its intent to listen to some of the operations with the poll call. Effectively, this tells the CIS agent that the i2 connector wants to check for the output of the registered operations.

Chapter 1. Overview of the connector 3