Collaborations and connectors interact by sending and receiving business objects through the InterChange Server.
A business object reflects a data entity--a collection of data that can be treated as an operative unit. For example, a data entity can be equivalent to a form, including of all of the form's fields. The form might typically be used in an application, or over the Web, to contain business information about customers, or employees, or invoices.
Business objects are cached in memory during collaboration execution for fast access, and also stored in a persistent transaction state store to provide robust recovery, rollback, and re-execution of collaborations upon server restarts after failures.
The WBI system creates business objects that reflect the information contained in entities. In this manual, a data entity is often referred to in the context of the kind of business information it contains--for example, an employee entity or a customer entity.
A business object can act as an event, a request, or a response.
A business object can report the occurrence of an application event. The event is triggered by an operation that affected a data entity in an application. The application event might be the creation, deletion, or change in value of that collection of data. When a connector detects an application event and sends a business object to an interested collaboration, the business object has the role of representing the event, and so it is called an event in the WBI system. For example, a connector might poll an application for new employee entities on behalf of a collaboration. If the application creates a new employee entity, the connector sends an event business object to the collaboration.
Requests are typically generated in one of two ways:
When a connector finishes processing a request, it usually returns a response. For example, after a connector receives a request to retrieve employee data from an application, it sends a business object containing the employee data.