This chapter describes exporting Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) pricing data for use by external applications.
You can export products, discounts, and sponsorships (chargeshares) from BRM to external customer relationship management (CRM) applications in a batch. You might do this to:
Start a CRM integration by sending your existing pricing data to the external CRM.
Supplement real-time synchronization of pricing data with the external CRM.
You export products, discounts, and chargeshares in a batch by using the "pin_export_price" utility. This utility retrieves the data from the BRM database and uses the Synchronization Queue Data Manager (DM) to publish the data to an Oracle Advanced Queuing (AQ) database queue. The external CRM can retrieve the data from the Oracle AQ database queue by using processes implemented using Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Application Integration Architecture.
Note:
For more information, see "Using BRM with the Oracle Application Integration Architecture" in BRM Concepts.To synchronize data in real time, see "Understanding the Synchronization Queue Data Manager".
The pin_export_price utility is a standalone multithreaded application (MTA) that synchronizes product, discount, and chargeshare data between BRM and an external CRM in a batch.
The pin_export_price utility performs the following operations:
Searches for /product, /discount, and /sponsorship objects that meet the criteria set in the utility's parameters.
Retrieves the data for those objects. For products, the following data is not retrieved:
Pipeline rate plans
Rollovers
Ratable usage metric (RUM) groups
Generates the following notification events, which detail the /product, /discount, and /sponsorship objects that are being exported:
/event/notification/price/discounts/modify
/event/notification/price/products/modify
/event/notification/price/sponsorships/modify
The data is sent to the Payload Generator External Module (EM), which then sends the data in the form of business events to the Synchronization Queue DM. The Synchronization Queue DM sends the business events to the Oracle AQ database queue.
For more information about:
Business events, see "About the EAI Framework" in BRM Installation Guide.
Synchronization Queue DM, see "Understanding the Synchronization Queue Data Manager".
Oracle AQ database queues, see "About the Oracle AQ Database Queue".
To set up BRM to export pricing data in a batch, you must:
Install and configure the Synchronization Queue Data Manager and start the Synchronization Queue DM (dm_aq). See "Installing and Configuring the Synchronization Queue DM".
Edit the pin_export_price configuration file (BRM_home/apps/pin_export_price/pin.conf).
This configuration file has the standard Connection Manager (CM) connection and MTA entries. See:
"About Configuration and Properties Files" in BRM System Administrator's Guide.
"Configuring Your Multithreaded Application" in BRM Developer's Guide.
Important:
This configuration file must be present in the location from which you run the utility.You can use the pin_export_price utility to export the following from BRM to the Oracle AQ database queue:
All pricing data (products, discounts, and chargeshares). See "Exporting All Pricing Data".
Pricing data based on the object type. See "Exporting Pricing Data Based on the Object Type".
Pricing data based on the modification time. See "Exporting Pricing Data Based on the Modification Time".
Pricing data based on the service type. See "Exporting Pricing Data Based on the Service Type".
For a list of pin_export_price parameters and the syntax for using them, see "pin_export_price".
To export all pricing data (products, discounts, and chargeshares) in your system as a batch, go to the BRM_home/apps/pin_export_price directory and enter the following command:
pin_export_price
To export pricing data based on the object type, go to the BRM_home/apps/pin_export_price directory and enter one of these commands:
To export only /product objects:
pin_export_price -p
To export only /discount objects:
pin_export_price -d
To export only /sponsorship objects:
pin_export_price -s
To export all or a subset of the pricing data based on the modification time, go to the BRM_home/apps/pin_export_price directory and enter the following command:
pin_export_price [-p | -d | -s] -t timestamp
where timestamp specifies to retrieve only pricing data that was modified on or after the specified timestamp. You specify the timestamp by using the ISO-8601 standard format: YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss[+|-]TZD. If you do not specify TZD, the utility uses the server's local time zone as the default. If your server and database are in different time zones, you must specify the time zone.
For example, the following command exports all products that were modified after 12:00 PM on April 15, 2007, in the UTC-9 time zone:
pin_export_price -p -t 2007-04-15T12:00:00-09:00
To export /product or /discount objects based on the service type, go to the BRM_home/apps/pin_export_price directory and enter the following command:
pin_export_price {-p | -d} -S ServiceType1 [, ServiceType2 ...]
where ServiceTypeN specifies the service's storable class name, such as /service/telco/gsm/data. You can specify multiple service types by using a comma (,) as a delimiter.
Important:
You cannot export /sponsorship objects based on the service type. The utility fails if you use the -S ServiceTypeN parameter with the -s parameter.Note:
The utility does not validate the name of the service type passed in with the -S parameter. If an invalid service type name is passed, the application does not return anything and does not report an error.For example, the following command exports all products that are associated with the /service/telco/gsm/telephony and /service/telco/gsm/data service types:
pin_export_price -p -S /service/telco/gsm/telephony, /service/telco/gsm/data