Managing Business Events (Oracle Workflow Help)

Oracle Workflow Guide
Release 2.6.2
Part Number A95265-03


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Managing Business Events

The Oracle Workflow Business Event System is an application service that leverages the Oracle Advanced Queuing (AQ) infrastructure to communicate business events between systems. The Business Event System consists of the Event Manager and workflow process event activities.

The Event Manager contains a registry of business events, systems, named communication agents within those systems, and subscriptions indicating that an event is significant to a particular system. Events can be raised locally or received from an external system or the local system through AQ. When a local event occurs, the subscribing code is executed in the same transaction as the code that raised the event, unless the subscriptions are deferred.

Subscriptions can include the following types of processing:

Executing custom code on the event information

Sending event information to a workflow process

Sending event information to other queues or systems

Business events are represented within workflow processes by event activities. By including event activities in a workflow process, you can model complex processing or routing logic for business events beyond the options of directly running a predefined function or sending the event to a predefined recipient. See: Event Activity.

The uses of the Business Event System include:

System integration messaging hubs--Oracle Workflow with the Business Event System can serve as a messaging hub for complex system integration scenarios. The Event Manager can be used to "hard-wire" routing between systems based on event and originator. Workflow process event activities can be used to model more advanced routing, content-based routing, transformations, error handling, and so on.

Distributed applications messaging--Applications can supply Generate and Receive event message handlers for their business entities. For example, message handlers can be used to implement Master/Copy replication for distributed applications.

Message-based system integration--You can set up subscriptions which cause messages to be sent from one system to another when business events occur. In this way, you can use the Event Manager to implement point-to-point messaging integration.

Business-event based workflow processes--You can develop sophisticated workflow processes that include advanced routing or processing based on the content of business events.

Non-invasive customization of packaged applications-- Analysts can register interesting business events for their internet or intranet applications. Users of those applications can register subscriptions to those events to trigger custom code or workflow processes.

Event Manager

The Oracle Workflow Event Manager lets you register interesting business events that may occur in your applications, the systems among which events will be communicated, named communication agents within those systems, and subscriptions indicating that an event is significant to a particular system. You can use the Event Manager web pages to define and maintain these events, systems, agents, and subscriptions.

Note: You must have workflow administrator privileges to access the Event Manager web pages.

You can use the Workflow XML Loader to upload and download XML definitions for Business Event System objects between a database and a flat file. See: Using the Workflow XML Loader.

When an event is raised by a local application or received from a local or external system, the Event Manager executes any subscriptions to that event. Depending on the action defined in the subscription, the Event Manager may call custom code, send the event information to a workflow process, or send the event information to an agent.

The Event Manager also lets you complete your setup for message propagation, including scheduling listeners for inbound event messages and propagations for outbound event messages.

After you finish setting up the Business Event System, you can use the Event Manager to raise events manually, sign up systems to receive business events from each other, synchronize systems with each other, and review your local queues. You can test your setup using Workflow Agent Ping/Acknowledge.

Managing Business Events

Event Manager

See Also