Assets and Processing
This section briefly explains assets and processing you must understand to perform the tasks in this guide.
The following table describes the assets:
Asset | Description |
Document attributes | Define pieces of document content, such as sender or receiver, user status, or purchase order amount. |
Document types | Define categories of documents, such as XML or flat file. Documents can also specify pre-processing actions to perform for documents you receive, such as saving documents to the Trading Networks database. Note:
You can only perform the tasks in this guide on documents that have been saved to the Trading Networks database. |
Processing rules | Define pre-processing and processing actions to perform for documents you receive. Processing actions can include executing a service and delivering a document to a partner. Document delivery can include these types of delivery:  Immediate delivery, in which Trading Networks delivers documents directly to the partner. Scheduled delivery, in which Trading Networks places documents in a queue and delivers the documents in batches to the partner at scheduled times. |
Profiles | Identify your corporation and the corporations of the partners in your trading network, and specify how to connect to partners and exchange documents. |
Some documents might require multi-step processing that involves interaction among systems, people, and trading partners. An example of such processing is the fulfillment of a purchase order that includes a purchase order document, human interaction to determine whether to approve the purchase order, and either an order acknowledgment (ACK) document or an order negative acknowledgement (NACK) document. For such processing, you can define a business process, and you can use the business process instead of or in addition to a processing rule. For complete information on business processes, see the webMethods BPM documentation.
Trading Networks processes documents as follows:
1. A document enters the Trading Networks system (for example, a partner sends a document).
2. Trading Networks compares the document to defined document types until it finds a match. This is called document recognition.
3. Trading Networks extracts document attributes from the document and performs any pre-processing actions that are defined in the document type.
4. If the document type indicates to use a processing rule for the document, Trading Networks compares the document to your defined processing rules until it finds a match. Trading Networks then performs the pre-processing and processing actions defined in the processing rule.
If the rule defines an action to execute a service, and the action uses reliable execution to make repeated attempts, Trading Networks creates a service execution task to keep track of the attempts.
If the rule defines an action to deliver a document, and the action uses reliable delivery to make repeated attempts, Trading Networks creates a delivery task to keep track of the attempts.
If a document matches no or multiple document types, the document is considered to have an unknown document type. Since document types identify the attributes to extract from a document, Trading Networks cannot extract attributes from a document whose document type is unknown. However, if you have a processing rule that processes unknown document types, Trading Networks does try to process the document using that rule.
If a document was sent by one of your partners but Trading Networks cannot determine the sender (for example, because the document type is unknown and the document sender attribute could not be extracted), the sender is considered an unknown partner. If you have a processing rule that processes documents that are sent by the partner, the document will not match the rule and the document will not be processed.