Creating Business Flags

Business flags may be created in a system for one of the following reasons:

  • A message is received from an external system that initiates the creation of a business flag. In this case, logic in the external system has detected some situation that this product is being alerted about.

  • Business logic in this product detects a situation that should be investigated or should act as a flag. In this scenario, there may not be any integration needed depending on the business rules.

  • Business logic in this product detects a situation that another integrated product should be alerted about. In this scenario, the business flag record is used to send out information to the integrated product.

  • A user manually creates a business flag based on knowledge of the affected entity. For example, a customer service representative may create a business flag as a result of contact with the customer.

Creating a Business Flag from a Web Service

The system supplies both a REST and SOAP inbound web service that may be used for an external system to initiate (or update) a business flag. The REST service is F1-BusinessInsights. The SOAP service is F1-BusinessFlagSync. In both cases, the web service invokes a "driver" service script whose ultimate responsibility is to determine the appropriate Business Flag Type based on the standard name or external standard name, and therefore the appropriate business object for the new business flag. Because different products may have different logic related to creating a business flag, the service script calls another service script linked to the maintenance object using the Business Flag Sync MO option.

The "driver" service script includes a "contextData" group, which in turn references the data area F1-BusinessFlagContext. This data area is to allow for an external system to provide additional information for a given business flag use case. For any integration that requires additional information to be passed in from the external system, a separate data area should be used to define the additional elements; and that data area should refer to F1-BusinessFlagContext as its extended data area.

The framework does not supply a Business Flag Sync service script, however individual edge applications supply a service script based on the use cases it supports out of the box.

Note: For products that are continuing to use XAI for external messages, the product also includes an XAI inbound service for the same Business Flag Sync Driver service script. Note that the product recommendation is to discontinue use of XAI and use inbound web services instead.

Error Handling

If there is a problem in trying to create a business flag based on incoming information, the Business Flag Sync Driver service script creates a special business flag record using the Business Flag Error Business Object. This is also configured on the maintenance object as an option. The framework product supplies the business object Business Flag Error (F1-BusinessFlagError) for this functionality. Refer to the business object description and configuration for more information.