The purpose with this page is to describe the technology used by IFS Financial Connector.
Extended Server adds a platform independent, powerful and fault tolerant J2EE based middleware to applications. Most importantly it includes the Java and COM access providers, giving any Java or COM based application full interactive access to business logic Activity APIs and Business APIs.
The access providers are an important part of the open integration strategy, making integration with non-IFS software and clients a snap. The Java access provider is also used internally in Foundation1 by IFS Connect to invoke the business logic.
Another essential component of the Extended Server is the Java Server Framework that enables interaction with Oracle databases and hides J2EE implementation details from the developer. A developer will never have to know about J2EE methods and interfaces, all that is visible is the Java Server Framework.
The Java Server Framework is used for development of Business APIs. Such Business APIs can be published as web services using IFS Connect.
Extended Server is also a development and runtime framework for development of server components that otherwise would have had to be developed without Foundation1 support. This can be applications that require in-memory integration with external programs or other types of integrations that can be hard to achieve from within PL/SQL code.
The IFS Financial Connector implements a number of Business APIs in the Extended Server framework.
IFS Connect is a component in the IFS Extended Server framework that is a platform independent open framework for integration of business logic with external business processes, applications, and devices. IFS Connect makes it possible to expose Business APIs through multiple protocols and formats, for example as web services.
The openness and flexibility of IFS Connect is achieved through the concept of connectors. A connector is a software component that translates between the internal XML format and IIOP protocol of IFS Connect to the external format and protocol. For example, the Mail connector translates to MIME format and SMTP protocol. The connectors are hosted by a framework that provides services such as SOAP enveloping and XML transformation.
IFS Connect includes a number of ready-to-use connectors as well as a development framework to build your own. IFS Connect is based on Internet communication standards and include connectors such as Mail, SMS, Http/SSL, IBM MQ Series, and many more. These existing connectors play a central part in the Foundation1 support for open integration.
The IFS Financial Connector uses IFS Connect to send and receive xml messages on any transport connector.
Content Based Routing (CBR) provides the means of configuring how messages of various types will be sent, and what Business API interface will be used for received messages.
CBR also allows for the definition of Connect Transformers that may be used for transforming the message contents from IFS XML to other formats (outbound) and from those other formats to IFS XML (inbound). Both inbound and outbound messages may be handled synchronously (direct calls) or asynchronously (stored in a message queue) and processed sequentially from the queue).
Routing rules are based on the content of the message and the rules are administrated using a windows tool feature.
The IFS Financial Connector needs the Content Based Routing to configure the outbound and inbound messages.
The outbound messages need to be configured to be sent to a specified receiver on a transport connector. If the OAG standard is to be used then a transformer is also specified for the receiver.
The inbound messages needs a configuration in the CBR to invoke one of the inbound methods in IfsFinancialsInboundMessages or if the OAG standard is to be used in the OagInboundMessages server. If the OAG standard is used then a transformer is also specified.
The PLSQL Access Provider will allow invocations of server operations from PLSQL code executing within Oracle 8.1.6 (or higher) database.
The PLSQL Access Provider is used to send messages, call outbound Business APIs, and to invoke any operation implemented in Extended Server.
The IFS Financial Connector uses the asynchronous PLSQL Access Provider to make calls from the PLSQL environment to the Extended Server environment for the outbound messages Send Voucher, Send_Customer_Invoice and Send Supplier Invoice.
Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) is a Meta data language approved as a standard by the World Wide Web Consortium in February 1998. XML evolved from the Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML) as a compromise between the complex SGML and the simple, but non-extensible HTML.
It has been described as providing 80% of the benefit of SGML with 20% of the effort and it is being embraced by a broad cross-section of the industry as the right language for defining the APIs necessary to make business software components talk to each other.
IFS has an automatic conversion from the Business API's input and output record parameters to XML.
The conversion to/from record (view) from/to XML is done with fixed rules. This gives the advantage that it's no need to use any XML parser when sending or receiving XML, instead all handling for this is automatically processed by the Java Server Framework in Foundation.
We call our XML-standard IFS XML
Due to the fact that fixed conversion to/from XML is used and that the Meta data definitions for the records are stored in an operational repository it is possible to generate xml schemas for the input and output parameters for every Business API.
Following schemas could be generated from the repository
IFS Connect has support for converting IFS XML to/from other XML formats or to flat files.
Transformers can either be XSLT (style sheet) or a java-class with a given interface.