Business Processes and Rules: Siebel Enterprise Application Integration > Creating and Using Dispatch Rules >

Overview of EAI Dispatch Service

The EAI Dispatch Service is a rule-based dispatching business service that invokes business services based on the properties of its input property set. The EAI Dispatch Service can execute transformations on an input property set before dispatching it to the target business service. Such transformations can be useful for setting business service arguments or workflow process properties. They can also be used to do limited hierarchy manipulation such as discarding the envelope of an XML document. Figure 1 illustrates the EAI Dispatch Service process.

Figure 1. EAI Dispatch Service Process

Although the EAI Dispatch Service is a utility to invoke one business service from another business service based on specified rules, one of its primary uses is to accomplish inbound and outbound integration. The EAI Dispatch Service can be the first business service of the inbound integration to decide which business service should process an incoming document. It can also be the last step of the outbound integration to send the outgoing document to the right transport. The EAI Dispatch Service is similar to the branching in Siebel Workflow. To determine whether to use Siebel Workflow or the EAI Dispatch Service, see Differences Between EAI Dispatch Service and Workflow.