Outbound Messages

Outbound messages provide functionality for routing XML messages to an external system real-time or in near real time. In addition the functionality supports collecting related messages into a batch to then be sent to an external system as a consolidate XML message.

For each outbound message that your implementation must initiate you define a business object for the outbound message maintenance object. Using the business object's schema definition, you define the fields that make up the XML source field. These are the fields that make up the basis for the XML message (prior to any XSL transformation).

Each outbound message requires the definition of its schema by creating a business object whose schema describes the information that is provided to the external system. An XSL transformation may then be performed when routing the message to an external system.

For each external system that may receive this message, you configure the appropriate message XSL and routing information.

Because the outbound message type is associated with a business object, your implementation can easily create outbound message records from a script using the Invoke business object step type. Such a script would do the following:

• Determine the appropriate outbound message type and external system based on business rules
• Access the data needed to populate the message detail
• Populate the fields in the schema and use the Invoke business object script step type for the outbound message type's business object to store the outbound message.
• The resulting outbound message ID is returned to the script and the scriptwriter may choose to design a subsequent step to store that ID as an audit on the record that initiated this message.

The following topics provide more information about functionality supported by outbound messages.