About Data Providers

You use data providers in conjunction with Data Instance behaviors to augment order information by retrieving information from external systems. After you've defined a data provider, you can reuse or extend the configuration for multiple Data Instance behaviors.

For example, consider that you have a task that requires information that is not included in an order, such as a customer name and address. To obtain this information, you can define in the Task editor a Data Instance behavior called Customer ID. When you define the properties for the data instance, you can specify an existing data provider or create a new data provider that will describe the configuration necessary to retrieve the information from the external CRM system. If, to attach to the external CRM system, you know that you will need to include a host value and a password, you can use the Data Provider editor to add host and password as input parameters and define default values for these parameters, written as an XPath or XQuery expression.