Glossary

action

An activity diagram symbol that indicates a single step in the business process. An action node contains a code fragment.

activity diagram

Defines the control flow for a collaboration's scenario. An activity diagram consists of a set of symbols that specify the actions required by the business process and the logic that determines the order in which the actions execute.

attribute

A data item in a business object.

BaseCollaboration

An InterChange Server Express-defined class from which all other collaboration classes are derived. The BaseCollaboration class contains methods for manipulating a collaboration.

binding

The act of attaching a collaboration object to the objects that can supply business objects to it or receive business objects from it. The objects to which a collaboration attaches can be connectors or other collaboration objects.

break
A symbol placed in an iterator's activity diagram to force premature termination of the iteration.

business object

A set of data that represents a business entity, along with a verb that indicates an action on the data.

business object definition

A description of the format and data contained in a business object. A business object definition contains a name, a version, a set of supported verbs, and an ordered set of attributes.

business object probe

Monitors and reports the values of a specified business object's attributes during runtime. Business object probes can be placed on any transition link (with the exception of a decision node's incoming transition link and a service call link).

BusObj

An InterChange Server Express-defined class that represents a business object.

BusObjArray

An InterChange Server Express-defined class that represents an array of business objects. BusObjArray is used for a business object attribute whose value is a reference to an array of child business objects.

code fragment

The specification of an action via a series of code statement, using the collaboration API or other Java code.

collaboration

Business logic that describes a generic distributed business process. A collaboration interacts with individual applications, tying together the events and data of these different applications and extending their functionality.

collaboration group

An executable set of collaboration objects, formed by binding collaboration objects.

collaboration object

An object created from a collaboration template. A collaboration object is executable when it is configured and bound to applications, represented by connectors, or to other collaborations.

collaboration configuration property

Any configurable information about an InterChange Server Express object. A collaboration template has standard properties and collaboration-specific properties. A collaboration developer creates collaboration-specific properties to enable an administrator to specify some aspect of the collaboration object's runtime behavior.

collaboration template

The logic and framework of a collaboration. A collaboration template provides the definition of a collaboration and from which a collaboration object may be instantiated; a collaboration template itself is never executable.

CollaborationException

An InterChange Server Express-defined exception object.

compensation

The action that a collaboration takes during rollback of a transaction to undo a previously-executed service call.

control flow

The flow of business process logic. Within collaborations, an activity diagram defines the control flow for a particular scenario, specifying the actions required for the business process. Decision nodes and iterators are used within the activity diagram to further specify the execution order of the action nodes.

correlation attribute

Identifies a conversation between two business processes when a collaboration is used as a long-lived business process. Correlation attributes are initialized by a start node or outbound service call; they can then be used by conversation participants to make external calls or to receive a matching event from external sources.

currentException

An InterChange Server Express-defined variable that holds the value of the preceding exception. The scope of currentException is raised in the preceding action, subactivity, or iterator.

decision node

A node that handles decision branching in a scenario. Decision nodes are used when there are multiple possible outcomes of an action, subdiagram, or iterator node. Each branch in a decision node has a condition, and the control flow shifts to the branch whose condition evaluates to true.

declaration

The name and type of a variable that you intend to use. The compiler requires a declaration for each variable used.

event isolation

The assurance that multiple collaborations do not concurrently process events that relate to the same business object data.

event sequencing

InterChange Server's assurance that a collaboration processes multiple events that relate to the same business object one at a time, in the same order in which the events arrive.

exception

An object used to pass a runtime error to some other entity that can handle the error. In an activity diagram, an exception is caught on an exception transition link.

failed event
This term has been changed. See unresolved flow.

full-valued business object

A business object that has data values for more attributes than just primary key attributes.

import statement

A Java statement that includes a class or a package of classes into the collaboration class.

iterator

An activity diagram symbol that embeds a reference to a nested diagram that implements a looping operation, and the diagram that contains the looping behavior. An iterator can loop through all attributes in a business object or through all elements of a business object array.

key values
The values of attributes that typically comprise the unique identification of a business object or the associated application entity.

long-lived business process

A method of configuring and deploying a collaboration to enable asynchronous communication between business processes. In a long-lived business process, event flow context persists throughout the duration of a service call.

minimum transaction level
The transaction level set by a collaboration template developer, indicating the level of transaction services required for executing collaboration objects created from the template.

package

A group of related Java classes. A collaboration template can be made part of a package and it can import other packages.

port

The interface between a collaboration and other objects in the InterChange Server Express system. It is through a port that a collaboration object binds with a connector or with another collaboration object.

reference-valued business object

A business object that contains values for only its key attributes. It does not contain values for non-key attributes.

scenario

The code that handles one or more incoming events. Scenarios can be used to partition a collaboration's logic.

scenario tree
The set of scenarios, displayed hierarchically, that includes composite scenarios, subdiagrams, and iterators.

scenario variable

A variable whose scope extends to all parts of all diagrams in a scenario.

service call

An activity diagram symbol that represents a request to an InterChange Server Express object outside the collaboration, such as a connector or another collaboration.

subdiagram

An activity diagram symbol that represents another, nested, activity diagram, and the nested diagram itself.

template variable

A variable whose scope extends to all scenarios in a collaboration template.

template tree view
The tree viewer that displays the template definitions, scenario tree, and message file of the collaboration template. Display of the template tree view is optional.

transactional collaboration

A collaboration that follows the database transactional model and provides for data consistency for business processes. A transactional collaboration is capable of rolling back when a runtime error causes the collaboration object to fail. In a transactional collaboration, the service calls have compensation defined.

transition link

An activity diagram symbol that indicates control flow between other symbols of an activity diagram.

transactional verb
A business object verb that indicates a data modification, such as Create, Update, or Delete. Retrieve is not a transactional verb because it does not modify data.

triggering event

The business object that a connector sends to a subscribing collaboration when an application event occurs.

triggeringBusObj

The Designer-declared variable that contains a scenario's triggering event when the scenario starts to execute.

UID

A unique identifier for each symbol in the activity diagrams of a scenario.

unresolved flow

The business object whose receipt caused a collaboration to execute a scenario that ended unsuccessfully. An unresolved flow can be a failed flow (a flow that failed due to application or logic problems), a deferred flow (a flow whose recovery has been deferred), an in-transit flow (a flow created when the server crashes during a service call transmission in a collaboration configured for Service Call In-Transit persistence), or a possible duplicate flow (a flow that may have already been received by the collaboration).

Copyright IBM Corp. 2003, 2004