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Enterprise Patterns in Process Orchestration – Scatter Gather

AbdulGafoor
Advisor
Advisor
‎2013 Jan 23 4:31 PM
4,726

Summary

Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP) help in solving recurring problems faced in the integration of enterprise applications.  This article introduces the Scatter-Gather – one of the Enterprise Integration patterns in the context of SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration.

Applies to

SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration EhP1 for SAP NetWeaver 7.3 SP5

Authors

Abdul-Gafoor Mohamed & Prashant Gautam

Product Management, SAP NetWeaver BPM, SAP Labs

The Scatter-Gather Pattern in Process Orchestration

Enterprise Integration Patterns – Scatter-Gather

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is an integration framework composed of a collection of technologies and services that form a middleware, enabling the integration of systems and applications across an enterprise.[1] A twenty-first century enterprise typically consists of tons of distributed applications, varying percentages of which may be homegrown, acquired, legacy or even a combination of these.

Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP) are design patterns that help in solving recurring problems faced in the integration of enterprise applications.  The Scatter-Gather helps address this question:

“How do you maintain the overall message flow when a message must be sent to multiple recipients, each of which may send a reply?”[2]

Let us consider the example of a university celebrating its golden jubilee this year.  As part of the celebrations, about 15 buildings in the university campus need to be repainted.  The University requests vendors to submit their quotes for this task and hopes to choose a vendor that strikes a balance between economical pricing and efficiency of timeline in the completion of the painting task.  The quote request is broadcast to all the preferred vendors, but it is not necessary that each vendor responds to the request. 

Figure 1. An example illustrating the Scatter-Gather pattern


An Integration Scenario for the Scatter-Gather

You may notice the similarities with the Composed Message Pattern, but instead of a splitter sending a sub-message (smaller message) to the recipients, the whole message needs to be broadcast to all the recipients.  The Scatter-Gather then aggregates the responses based on certain well defined parameters.  Here, we may choose the best vendor that can complete the task of painting all the campus buildings in 90 days or less.

SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration Solution Outline

Figure 2. An integration scenario for the Scatter-Gather pattern

As depicted in Figure 2, we are dealing with these two integration configurations:

  • Integration Configuration1 (ICO1) – The SAP NetWeaver BPM system broadcasts the message to FolderRx on the Filesystem via SAP NetWeaver PI (AEX).
  • Integration Configuration2 (ICO2) – The quotes from various vendors will be consumed from FolderTx on the Filesystem by SAP NetWeaver BPM using the SAP NetWeaver PI (AEX).


SAP Process Orchestration Scenario

Figure 3. A generic SAP Process Orchestration scenario sequence


The Integration Flows have to be created and activated using the same interfaces that were used in the Business Process.  The generic scenario referenced above applies to most Enterprise Integration patterns.

Note: Only XI 3.0 compatible stateless interfaces are supported.


Process Modeling in SAP NetWeaver BPM

Prerequisites

  • The service interfaces to be used in the process model – Starting Interface and Automated activity – should be created first and then imported from the SAP NetWeaver PI Enterprise Service Repository.
  • For testing the BPM Process from the BPM Process repository, the UME action SAP_BPM_TRIGGER_EVENT should be assigned to the specific user role.


Process Model

Figure 4. A Scatter-Gather scenario modeled in SAP NetWeaver BPM

The Process Model for a Scatter-Gather scenario is shown in Figure 4.  The steps for modeling the process are enumerated below:

  • The Pattern starts with a service interface.
  • The quote request is broadcast to all the vendors.
  • A timer event starts at this point to keep track of the deadline to receive quotes.
  • Each vendor quote is processed by an aggregator in a loop.
  • An automated activity uses the input mapping to determine and send the best quote to SAP NetWeaver PI.

Notes:

  • Use the ‘XI’ service reference instead of ‘WS’ in the configuration settings of the automated activity. The Sender Component also needs to be specified.
  • Use the SAP NetWeaver PI Integration Flow Designer to create the configuration objects in SAP NetWeaver PI
  • Please refer to detailed information on Process Modeling using SAP NetWeaver BPM.

References / Related content


[1] Enterprise Application Integration, Wikipedia

[2] Gregor Hohpe & Bobby Woolf, Enterprise Integration Patterns. 2003

[3] Inbound and Outbound are terms used with reference to the application, in this case SAP NetWeaver BPM.

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