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About the Two Types of ASIs

There are two types of ASIs—inbound and outbound.

Inbound ASI

An inbound ASI defines an interface for services provided by Oracle. External applications use this type of ASI to invoke Siebel-provided services.

An external application makes an inbound request that the inbound dispatcher receives. Based on the information in the ASI, the dispatcher invokes one of several services to pass its data to the Siebel application—either a data synchronization service, other business services, or a workflow process. For further details about data synchronization services, see ASI Data Synchronization Services. For more information about business services and workflows, see Business Processes and Rules: Siebel Enterprise Application Integration.

The dispatcher determines which service to invoke, according to the ASI configuration and transport protocols. The ASI determines whether the service request is a request-response operation (a response containing the status of the operation or the data retrieved) or a one-way request (where no response is required). ASIs are configured to have the same input and output argument (Siebel Message), and always return a response unless you change the ASI argument. External applications can use inbound ASIs, which can be exposed as a Web service, XML, or Java. Figure 1 shows these processes.

Figure 1. Inbound ASI

Outbound ASI

An outbound ASI defines an interface from a Siebel application to an external application and provides a proxy to the external application that can be called from within the Siebel application. The Siebel application invokes this proxy to make a service request to the external application, soliciting information from the external service, which the Siebel database updates or displays to the user.

A workflow or a user interface event calls an outbound dispatcher. Based on the ASI configuration, the dispatcher invokes one of several services at runtime—Siebel Services, Partner Adapters, XML, or Web Services. The outbound dispatcher links a service name, interface, and transport or protocol binding to the ASI, which is also sent to the external application, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Outbound ASIs