Patterns

A pattern is a reusable solution that encapsulates a tested approach to solving a common architecture, design, or deployment task in a particular context.

An IBM® App Connect Enterprise pattern can be used to generate customized solutions to a recurring problem in an efficient way. IBM App Connect Enterprise patterns are provided to encourage the adoption of preferred techniques in message flow design to produce efficient and reliable flows. Patterns provide the following benefits:
  • Give you guidance for the implementation of solutions.
  • Increase development efficiency because resources are generated from a set of predefined templates.
  • Result in higher-quality solutions, through reuse of assets and common implementation of programming approaches, such as error handling and logging.
Click the Patterns Gallery tile from the Welcome page of the IBM App Connect Enterprise Toolkit to download and install the patterns that you want to use. Choose from different pattern categories:
  • Protocol transformation patterns
  • Format transformation patterns
  • Enterprise integration patterns
  • Scatter-gather patterns
  • Messaging patterns

You can also create your own user-defined patterns.

Each pattern has values that are known as pattern parameters. Pattern parameters are parameters that customize and configure an IBM App Connect Enterprise pattern. The pattern parameters that you configure depend on the particular pattern, and on the options that you enable for that pattern. An example of a pattern parameter is a queue name from where messages are read.

The IBM App Connect Enterprise patterns provide defaults for most pattern parameters. After you configure the pattern parameters, you create a pattern instance and all the resources you need for your pattern and the application with resources to deploy the solution are created for you. A pattern instance project also contains a pattern instance configuration file that stores the pattern parameter values.

You can open the pattern instance configuration file at any time to see the values of the pattern parameters. When a pattern configuration file is reopened, you can regenerate the IBM App Connect Enterprise projects. Regeneration deletes the generated IBM App Connect Enterprise projects and re-creates them from scratch.

You can create resources from each IBM App Connect Enterprise pattern multiple times to give you unique pattern instances, each with a different configuration.

In all cases, the specification of both the problem and the solution are indispensable parts of the pattern definition.