Introduction to Enterprise Business Flows

15 Designing and Constructing Enterprise Business Flows 15-1 15 Designing and Constructing Enterprise Business Flows This chapter describes how to define and implement Enterprise Business Flows EBFs. This chapter includes the following sections: ■ Section 15.1, Introduction to Enterprise Business Flows ■ Section 15.2, How to Define the Contract for an EBF ■ Section 15.3, How to Create the Contract for an EBF ■ Section 15.4, How to Implement the EBF as a BPEL Service

15.1 Introduction to Enterprise Business Flows

The EBF is used for implementing a business activity or a task that involves leveraging capabilities available in multiple applications. The EBF is about stringing together a set of capabilities available in applications to implement a coarse-grained business activity or task and composing a new service leveraging existing capabilities. The EBF involves only system-to-system or service-to-service interaction. The EBF has no activity that needs human intervention. In a canonical integration, the EBF is an implementation of an Enterprise Business Service EBS operation and calls other EBSs. It never calls an Application Business Connector Service ABCS or the applications directly. In other integration styles, the caller invoking the EBF can be either an application or any other service. Figure 15–1 and Figure 15–2 illustrate how some of the EBFs in the Order to Cash Process Integration Pack PIP are implemented to leverage existing capabilities. Figure 15–1 shows that the EBF is orchestrating a flow for syncing customers between the source application and the target application. When the sync operation is invoked from the source application, the EBF first checks whether the customer already exists in the target application. If so, it updates the customer in the target application; otherwise, it creates the customer in the target application. 15-2 Developers Guide for Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack Figure 15–1 Example of EBF Orchestrating a Flow from Source to Target Figure 15–2 demonstrates a flow that is receiving the sales order and orchestrating across customer creation, fulfillment, and update back in the source application with response. Designing and Constructing Enterprise Business Flows 15-3 Figure 15–2 Example of Sales Order Flow

15.2 How to Define the Contract for an EBF