Siebel Field Service Integration to Oracle Real-Time Scheduler Implementation Guide > Appointment Booking Integration >

Overview of Appointment Booking Integration

The appointment booking process includes the following flows:

• Get and Confirm Appointment. Makes an appointment request, displays the available slots, and then confirms one of the slots.
• Reschedule an Appointment. Rebooks a previously confirmed appointment.
• Cancel an Appointment. Cancels a confirmed appointment.
• Update an Appointment. Updates activity details.
• SLA Based Appointment (Contract Scheduling). Inserts an appointment into an optimized schedule to meet the SLA Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements of the customer.
• Get Latest Appointment Details. Gets the latest appointment details from Oracle Real-Time Scheduler.
• Book Appointment for Child Activity. Makes an appointment request for a bounded job.

A composite is a deployment unit of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) composite architecture that Oracle SOA Suite 11g supports. A composite includes various components, such as Mediator, BPEL flow, Adapters, and so forth. Siebel Field Service Integration to Oracle Real-Time Scheduler creates a single SOA composite to perform tasks that are related to the Appointment Booking System (ABS). The entry point to this composite is an outbound Web service call from Siebel CRM.

The Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) file defines the operations and the expected message formats. The service that is available is the entry point that Siebel CRM uses to target the Siebel CRM Web service request. Separate operations are defined within the WSDL to book an appointment, cancel an appointment, and so forth.

A single Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) process handles requests that occur in this composite. The mediator sets the OPERATION_TYPE global variable in the BPEL process in one of the following ways:

• To Book_Appt if the Web service operation is Book_Appointment
• To Confirm_Appt if the Web service operation is Confirm_Appointment
• And so forth for other Web service operations

This integration handles these requests so that it can use a single Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) process for these tasks and so that it can place a switch inside the BPEL that calls the appropriate Oracle Real-Time Scheduler Web service.

For more information, see Integration Services.