Processing Outbound Service Operations
Outbound EIPs exist throughout the PeopleSoft system, providing interface points for third-party applications requiring information as activity occurs within the PeopleSoft system. The PeopleSoft Application Messaging technology is utilized to format and publish industry standard XML messages. For example, as item master information is entered into PeopleSoft applications, the system generates XML-based messages and delivers them to third-party systems requiring this information to set up their own item master tables.
PeopleSoft CRM applications as well as interacting third-party systems have various processing and timing requirements that dictate when information can be generated or received. For this reason, the integration points provided by PeopleSoft utilize a number of different approaches when generating outbound application messages.
For example, a third-party system requiring item master information from the PeopleSoft Inventory application may want immediate incremental updates as information is changed online or may want periodic updates on a nightly or weekly basis. The Item Master EIP provides both options, giving the third-party system the choice as to how it wants to receive this information.
Component or Incremental Publish
The system generates Component Published messages immediately upon saving a component in various PeopleSoft applications. Components used to maintain setup type information such as items or customers utilize the Component Publish approach.
Batch Publish
Batch Publish messages provide the functionality to group many like transactions into a single message.
Background processes that work on batches of transactions at one time utilize this approach.
In addition, other processes use this approach where interface requirements demand various groupings of like transactions based on common information within each transaction. For example, an Advanced Shipping Notice message can be published to a customer when the customer's order is shipped within the PeopleSoft Inventory system. This message may go directly to the customer or it may go through third-party software that converts the XML message to one of the industry standard EDI formats, such as X.12, before passing it on to the customer. Using the options available with the Batch Publish approach, users can dictate whether to create a single message for all customers to send to the third-party software or create individual messages to send directly to each customer.
PeopleSoft CRM applications all use the Publish Outbound Message process to initiate the Batch Publish messages. Built into this routine is the Batch Publish utility, a common PeopleSoft tool that provides the functionality to group and filter or “chunk” messages as noted in the previous example.
The Batch Publish utility also provides the option to create flat files instead of XML messages, when file layout objects exist for transactions being generated. File layout objects are easy to modify, and PeopleSoft provides examples for all transactions included in the EDI feature.
Full Data Replication
Full data replication is the process used to seed, or initially populate or repopulate, a copy of an entire table onto a remote database or legacy system. The entire contents of the table are published to all systems that require a copy of the table. Generally, full data replication occurs with setup tables—that is, relatively static, low volume tables keyed by setID.
Once a copy of the table exists, incremental updates provide a mechanism or process to keep the copy up-to-date with changes made on the master. Incremental updates occur most often with transaction tables—that is, frequently updated tables keyed by business unit.
Most full data replication message names end in _FULLSYNC.