Defining ASIs

An Application Services Interface (ASI) is a release-independent interface published by Oracle that allows you to integrate Siebel applications with external applications. An ASI is a collection of related methods; each method contains input and output parameters. The methods and parameters are listed on the business service definition. Simple method parameters (such as a string or number) are defined directly in the service definition. Hierarchical method parameters are defined using integration objects.

Note: Web Services are used in ASI development, but they may not be apparent in the implementation on specific integration servers. ASIs are published in a standard metadata format—such as Extensible Markup Language Document Type Definitions (XML DTD) and Web Services Descriptive Language/XML Schemas (WSDL/XSD)—and are built using the ASI Framework. See About ASI Framework for more information.

Siebel ASIs are prebuilt and can be used immediately. ASIs provide a release-independent integration interface to the Siebel application, which remains unchanged with each upgrade to a new release. ASIs use the standard metadata format, which makes ASIs language-independent, so they return the same value type regardless of language setting.