The IBM WebSphere business integration system is an event-driven system, and connectors need some way to detect and record events that occur in the application. When you examine the application, determine whether it provides an event-notification mechanism that can notify the connector of changes to application data.
Event notification typically consists of a collection of processes that allows a connector to be notified of internal application events. The event record should include the type of the event, the business object name and verb, such as Customer and Create, and the data key required for the connector to retrieve associated data.
In addition, an event-notification strategy must incorporate the necessary mechanisms to ensure the data integrity between event records and the corresponding event data. In other words, an event notification should not occur until all the required data transactions for the event have completed successfully.
The design of an event notification mechanism varies depending on the extent to which the application reports application events and enables clients to retrieve event data. If the application provides an event notification interface such as an API, IBM recommends that you use this to implement the event-notification mechanism. The use of an API helps ensure that connector interactions with the application abide by application business logic. If the application provides an event-notification mechanism, use the following topics and questions to gather more information.
For example, if a new record is added or an existing customer is updated, determine whether the event-notification mechanism can provide information on the type of operation, such as Create or Update operations. If the connector supports delta operations, determine whether the event mechanism can provide information on exactly which subobjects or attributes changed.
In your project plan, describe the event-notification mechanism. If there is no existing event mechanism, determine what alternatives are available to detect changes to application data. For example, you might be able to provide event notification by setting up database triggers on tables in a relational database. Or the application might provide a batch-export capability that exports all database modifications to a file from which the connector can extract information about application events.