Near Real Time Messages

This section describes the capability to send outgoing messages from the system to another application in "near real time" using Outbound Messages and XAI. The process is referred to as "near real time" because an appropriate MPL receiver is continuously checking for new records in the outbound message table for processing.

For each outbound message that your implementation must initiate you define a business object for the outbound message maintenance object. Using the business object's schema definition, you define the fields that make up the XML source field. These are the fields that make up the basis for the XML message (prior to XSL transformation).

For each external system that may receive this message, you configure the appropriate message XSL and routing information.

Because the outbound message type is associated with a business object, your implementation can easily create outbound message records from a script using the Invoke business object step type. Such a script would

• Determine the appropriate outbound message type and external system based on business rules
• Access the data needed to populate the message detail
• Populate the fields in the schema and use the Invoke business object script step type for the outbound message type's business object to store the outbound message.
• The resulting outbound message ID is returned to the script and the scriptwriter may choose to design a subsequent step to store that ID as an audit on the record that initiated this message (for example store a case long entry or a field activity log entry)

The remaining points describe how the outbound message record is further processed.