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Prebuilt Employee Workflows

Siebel 7 provides two prebuilt workflows for Employee integration with PeopleSoft: Employee - Send PeopleSoft Customer Workflow and Employee - Receive PeopleSoft Customer Workflow. These workflows are described in the following sections.

Employee - Send PeopleSoft Customer Workflow

The Employee - Send PeopleSoft Customer workflow, shown in Figure 31, involves querying employees from the Siebel application and writing the data to an XML file.

Figure 31. Employee - Send PeopleSoft Customer Workflow
Click for full size image

Using the two process steps in the above workflow, you can obtain one or more employee records from the Siebel database to an XML file. The employees you choose to write to the XML file can be determined by using the Object Id process property of this workflow (Process Properties are discussed below).

For example, you can pass the Row Id of the employee you wish to obtain into this Object Id parameter. You can do this either programmatically (using Siebel eScript and Data Transformation Engine maps) or through Process Simulator. If you pass a specific value, the employee row that matches this row will be returned. If you want all the employees written to an XML file, leave this Object Id property empty.

Using the XML File Process Property, you can input name and directory location for the XML file. The active fields in the underlying integration object (which is named EAI Employee for this workflow) determine the format of the XML file.

Process Properties

The Employee Outbound workflow has several process properties. Except for the process property XML File, all others come by default. The XML File process property was created. Of all these process properties, three are a bit more important than others - Object Id, Siebel Message, and XML File. You can use Object Id to restrict the number of rows returned; leaving it empty will return all the rows. Siebel Message is used to transfer the object related data between workflow steps, in a hierarchical format. And finally, XML File can be used to store the name and location of the XML file to write the results to.

Workflow Steps

As shown in Figure 31, this integration workflow involves the following sequential processes:

  1. Query Employee from Siebel.

    2. At first, the Query method of the EAI Siebel Adapter business service is used to extract data from Siebel database. This is a standard business service shipped with the Siebel software.

    Two important parameters are passed to the Query method. First, the Integration Object Name is passed. This integration object is used to determine which fields need to be queried from the Siebel database. The EAI Siebel Adapter determines this by looking at the various active Integration Components and the active fields within each integration component. In this case, the underlying integration object is named EAI Account. The contents of this integration object can be seen from Siebel Tools.

    Next, the Object Id parameter, a process property is passed. This property can be used to restrict the account rows written to the XML file.

    The EAI Siebel Adapter queries using the input parameters and places the output into an output argument named Siebel Message (this is a Process Property), which will be used in the next workflow step. Siebel Message is a hierarchical data structure that is stored in the memory.

  2. Write Employee to XML File.

    3. After data about a particular account is obtained (in the Query Employee from Siebel step), it is written to an XML file. Another business service named EAI XML Write to File is used. The Write Siebel Message is used to write the Siebel Message output from the previous workflow step.

    Now some discussion about the input arguments the above method takes. Notice that both are process properties. File Name could have been of Literal type (instead of being a process property), because this variable is not required by other workflow steps. But this argument has been made a process property so that it can be accessed from outside (for example, through another workflow—where this workflow is a subprocess; or by using code). In essence, you will be placing the name of the XML file in this property (that is, C:\EmployeeOutbound.xml).

    The second argument is Siebel Message. The previous workflow step would have placed the account data into this process property. This workflow step accesses the exact same information (which is in a hierarchy/property set format) and converts it into XML format and writes it to a file.

    This workflow step has no Output Arguments because once the data is written to an XML file, the job of this workflow process is complete.


 Siebel Connector for PeopleSoft 
 Published: 18 April 2003