Sunday, August 21, 2005

Websphere Business Integration Modeler notes

Notes from reading an article on WBI Modeler

Article is at: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0502_mitra1/0502_mitra1.html

 

High level steps for creating a business models are as below:

 

  Creating a business modeling project.

  Creating the business items.

  Creating the process model (that involves identifying the individual tasks and defining their inputs and outputs).

  Creating the process flow by connecting the tasks together (as sequential or parallel steps).

 

 

Notes from reading documentation on WBI 5.1.1 on infocenter

 

Models are organized into folders which are referred to as catalogs.

 

In the same project multiple data catalogs/resources/organization/report/process can be created and they can also be nested.

 

Both processes and tasks represent activities that are performed in a business. Processes are more complex than tasks, however, and can be represented as a sequence of activities that are linked by flows of control and data. This sequence as a whole is known as a process flow. By contrast, tasks are atomic activities that cannot be divided into smaller actions. For example, Payment Handling is a process made up of three tasks: Input Customer Information, Input Customer Order, and Obtain Product Availability

 

The difference between a merge and a join is that in merge as soon as an input is received it is sent as an output where as in join it waits till all the inputs are received.

 

A single process can have multiple start nodes.

 

A stop node marks the end of a process. Every process, subprocess, and loop must have at least one stop node. When a flow reaches a stop node while the process is running, the process immediately terminates, even if there are other currently executing flows within the process.

 

Tasks are the basic building blocks representing activities in a process model. Each task performs some function. Visually, a task represents the lowest level of work you can portray in a process.

 

There are two types of tasks: local (specific to the process) and global (reusable within a project). A local task is owned by a process and can only be used by elements within that process. The task exists only while the process exists. A global task is a top-level task that you create in the Project Tree within a process catalog. It can be used by multiple processes within the project.