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integration, Bizagi's integration, types of integration

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Bizagi's Integration Layer

Objective

Bizagi's Integration Layer is focused on allowing the integration between a Bizagi implementation and any other systems of the organization. To make this possible, the interaction used to send and/or receive information between the systems, is defined as an interface.

The integration may involve transformation of data types, formats, or even it may be necessary to include some business logic in the exchange of messages. This depends on the systems that are to be integrated and also on the presence of specialized software such as EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) or ESB (Enterprise Server Bus). This software acts as middleware between the Core systems and the applications that invoke the different channels like CRM, ERP, BPM, etc.

Characteristics

Access to the Normalized Data Model

Business processes that are designed using Bizagi have a relational data model which coherently supports the businesses own management, the data collected as a result of the process execution (client information, request information, etc), as well as the catalog or parameters that usually are presented in an activity as options, to be selected from a drop-down list (Cities, Professions, Sex, etc.). This combination satisfactorily covers all the information associated with the business using a consequent logic model for the appropriate systematization of the process.

A common scenario of integration with other systems may involve the recovery of a set of data previously saved, so that later on, a request can be made which will retrieve other data that required being associated to the process. This is the case in the client’s basic information request from the Core systems. With a given identification number, it is possible to obtain the names, address, phone numbers and other information and in this way third party applications are supplied with the information from the clients module of the central system. A more complex situation is presented in transactional integrations where new instances are created on the other systems (for example credit cards or mortgage creation) and integrity between the systems is an issue.

Considering all this, the Bizagi’s integration layer allows to intuitively browse through the process data model, making it easier to recovery the data, in some moment of the process, to then include it in message as part of the invocation to the external system. In the same way the response obtain is stored, allowing being used where the process needs it.

Transactional Control

One of the principal characteristics of the integration layer is the transactional control over the requests that are made. This makes it possible for the operations performed to comply with the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) properties. This means that Bizagi commits transactions only when they are completed without errors, otherwise a rollback is executed to guarantee the integrity of the data involved and also the instance of the process that triggered the petition.

Types of Integration

Data Level

The data level integration means that Bizagi is able to interact directly with other relational databases for the purpose of retrieving information from these databases, apart from the BPM, and include it into the data model of the designed process. This is acquired through two features in Bizagi:

Virtualization and;

Replication

Using SOA

The integration layer in Bizagi follows the Service Oriented Architecture principles allowing the invocation of Web-based Services (SOAP or RESTful services) that exchange primitive data types (Integer, Float, String) or more complex like XML documents, making possible the independence of platform and programming languages of the systems involved.

Learn more about calling an external system (REST or SOAP web services) from Bizagi processes.

It is also possible that other systems may want to integrate with the BPM. For this, Bizagi includes its Service Oriented Integration Layer (also known as SOA Layer).

Every process designed in Bizagi is automatically available to be invoked by Web Services whose inputs and outputs are XML documents. Any application that implements Bizagi SOA Layer has the possibility to create new instances of the processes, execute a process activity, execute an action, consult or add information about the process.

Learn more about SOA Layer

Email Level

The integration of Bizagi with SMTP servers for the purpose of sending notifications is a natural integration, in which only a few parameters must be configured to be able to send the request to relay the message to the organization’s mail server. The required information includes: the server’s name or IP address, the mail account in that server which will be used to send the notifications and, optionally, a second mail account if desired to send a copy of every notification to another recipient.

Learn how to configure the Email parameters

LDAP

Using the actual information of users in the LDAP systems, it is possible to automatically create new users in Bizagi or keep the information of existing users updated. This maintenance task can be configured to run at a certain hour of the day.

Learn how to configure the LDAP synchronization

With Distributed Objects (Enterprise JEE and Enterprise .NET Editions)

Create components with the algorithms necessary to invoke remote systems using distributed objects as COM/DCOM. These components can then be register on Bizagi Component Library for further used to achieve the integration.

Learn about Bizagi Component Library

ECM

Bizagi’s normal repository for uploaded documents is the file system of the web server where a folder structure, created depending on the data model, is used to classify the documents. In addition to this, now is also possible to connect to an ECM (Enterprise Content Management) system so the management of uploaded documents may be easier and they may also be shared with users of the ECM that don’t have access to Bizagi.

The connectivity with the ECM is done using CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) so, with some restrictions, is possible to connect with any CMIS-compliant repository.

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