Here's my blurb on Service Connect (SC).
SC is a web services orchestration engine. It happens to know how to
talk to (and perhaps has a particular affinity with) Vantage web
services, but it can generically talk to any web service endpoint. It
is also an XML document transformation engine at heart: it gets input,
converts it to XML if needed, processes it according to the workflow you
write, converting one XML document into another, and calling web service
methods along the way.
Functionally, you can exercise most of the API that the Vantage client
itself talks to. The Vantage web services are wrappers around the
native Vantage business object methods (e.g. Part.Update,
Customer.Delete, and so on) with some convenience and automation built
in to make them easier to work with.
The typical use case for SC is to automate or script a task that would
be inefficient to do via the client UI. So generally one turns on
tracing to capture the Business Object calls that the client is making
for a particular task, and then one replicates that same activity (with
appropriate simplifications, etc.) in Service Connect.
In terms of supplanting or replacing a particular piece of the
business logic, that could get tricky. I would imagine you'd have to
write a BPM Method Directive that would probably get invoked after the
normal PO approval is determined, and that Method Directive could call a
SC workflow. In that workflow you could figure out a new approval based
on whatever criteria you can think of, and apply that approval process
instead.
It is not obvious to me looking at the POService and POApvMsgService
now the approval process works and whether one could change this logic
but I only looked at it for a couple of minutes.
-bws
--
Brian W. Spolarich ~ Manager, Information Services ~ Advanced Photonix /
Picometrix
bspolarich@... ~ 734-864-5618 ~
www.advancedphotonix.com
From: vantage@yahoogroups.com [mailto:vantage@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf
Of Joe Rojas
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2009 9:39 AM
To: vantage@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Vantage] What can Service Connect do?
Hi All,
There have been a couple of threads related to SC and they've all seen
to be about data updates. data imports, and data exports.
Can SC do more than this? If so, what are some other examples of what SC
can do?
I would like to find a way to "enhance" the PO Approval process in
Vantage 8.03 so that is works on a matrix based system as opposed to the
one dimensional approach it uses out of the box. For example, when you
cut a PO, it's for type Inventory, Subcontract, Job Material, or Other.
It would be nice to have different PO Approvals level for each type for
a buyer or maybe by Part Class. Is this something SC can do?
Joe Rojas
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
SC is a web services orchestration engine. It happens to know how to
talk to (and perhaps has a particular affinity with) Vantage web
services, but it can generically talk to any web service endpoint. It
is also an XML document transformation engine at heart: it gets input,
converts it to XML if needed, processes it according to the workflow you
write, converting one XML document into another, and calling web service
methods along the way.
Functionally, you can exercise most of the API that the Vantage client
itself talks to. The Vantage web services are wrappers around the
native Vantage business object methods (e.g. Part.Update,
Customer.Delete, and so on) with some convenience and automation built
in to make them easier to work with.
The typical use case for SC is to automate or script a task that would
be inefficient to do via the client UI. So generally one turns on
tracing to capture the Business Object calls that the client is making
for a particular task, and then one replicates that same activity (with
appropriate simplifications, etc.) in Service Connect.
In terms of supplanting or replacing a particular piece of the
business logic, that could get tricky. I would imagine you'd have to
write a BPM Method Directive that would probably get invoked after the
normal PO approval is determined, and that Method Directive could call a
SC workflow. In that workflow you could figure out a new approval based
on whatever criteria you can think of, and apply that approval process
instead.
It is not obvious to me looking at the POService and POApvMsgService
now the approval process works and whether one could change this logic
but I only looked at it for a couple of minutes.
-bws
--
Brian W. Spolarich ~ Manager, Information Services ~ Advanced Photonix /
Picometrix
bspolarich@... ~ 734-864-5618 ~
www.advancedphotonix.com
From: vantage@yahoogroups.com [mailto:vantage@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf
Of Joe Rojas
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2009 9:39 AM
To: vantage@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Vantage] What can Service Connect do?
Hi All,
There have been a couple of threads related to SC and they've all seen
to be about data updates. data imports, and data exports.
Can SC do more than this? If so, what are some other examples of what SC
can do?
I would like to find a way to "enhance" the PO Approval process in
Vantage 8.03 so that is works on a matrix based system as opposed to the
one dimensional approach it uses out of the box. For example, when you
cut a PO, it's for type Inventory, Subcontract, Job Material, or Other.
It would be nice to have different PO Approvals level for each type for
a buyer or maybe by Part Class. Is this something SC can do?
Joe Rojas
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]