Trading Networks

Trading Networks enables you to build and manage a peer-to-peer or hub-and-spoke network of trading partners. Trading Networks enables trading partners to exchange business documents in XML and structured flat-file formats.

Trading Networks offers a web browser-based user interface in which you build the elements you need to define and link trading partners. The illustration below shows a partner profile definition in this user interface.

Element	Purpose
Trading partner definitions	Define and administer your trading partners.
Business document types	Define the business documents that trading partners want to exchange. A business document type can define an industry-standard document, such as an EDI, RosettaNet, cXML, CBL, or OAG document, or a custom business document.
Processing rules	Define how to process business documents. For example, the processing rule for a purchase order you receive from a trading partner might verify the sender's signature and then submit it to your order management system. Note: If you need more complicated processing than is possible in the Trading Networks user interface, you can design a business process in Designer to use in addition to or instead of a processing rule.
Trading Partner Agreements (TPAs)	Customize the way in which documents are exchanged between trading partners. For example, you and a trading partner might use a TPA to specify a custom ID field to include in all business documents.

Trading Networks provides templates that enable you to easily create onboarding questionnaires. Partners can respond to onboarding campaigns by replying to email invitations or by accessing self-service portals. Trading Networks administrators can easily generate reminder emails to partners that have not responded.

Trading Networks also includes a component that runs on Integration Server and manages the exchange of business documents among trading partners. When Trading Networks receives a document, it processes the document according to the processing rule for that document type.

Trading Networks provides a flexible schedule-based ability to suspend document deliveries to partners. Administrators can proactively schedule document delivery suspensions as necessary to accommodate planned partner outages.

Trading Networks is tightly integrated with API Gateway to selectively expose the APIs available in API Gateway and manage access for each partner. Trading Networks supports usage monitoring of API Gateway APIs; administrators can to view and monitor API invocations of APIs granted to trading partners.