Document Tracking Service

The Document Tracking service enables you to define correlation name-value pairs to gather additional tracking data about documents.

When you create or edit a business process, you can include the Document Tracking service at appropriate points in a business process to define additional tracking data that Sterling B2B Integrator gathers about a document (or a family of documents).

The additional tracking data is defined using any number of correlation name-value pairs that are associated with the specified primary document. These correlation name-value pairs provide Sterling B2B Integrator with more pieces of information about which you can query for document data.

When you add the Document Tracking service to a business process and set the use-system-default to TRUE when you are configuring the Document Tracking service, tracking is only performed if it is enabled at the business process level. So, if the Document Tracking service is present in a business process (and you set use-system-default to TRUE and tracking is enabled in the business process), tracking is automatically enabled at that point, regardless of how you configured the global document tracking system default. Using the Document Tracking service in this manner enables you to control the exact moment that a tracking record is updated.

The Document Tracking service can override the default system discovery level.

When you set up a business process, you can include one or more tracking services. If document tracking has been enabled when you check in the business process, the information discovery process is responsible for creating the document tracking record (and populating it with an unique tracking ID along with predefined tracking data). The document tracking service then adds to the contents of the tracking record. However, if document tracking is not enabled, the tracking service creates the tracking record.

Example: Using the Document Tracking Service

When the business process is executed and documents are processed, tracking data about the documents is gathered and passed from one step in the business process to the next. For example, during one of the steps in the process, if Document A is split into three documents-A1, A2 and A3-all four documents (Document A, A1, A2, and A3) share a common tracking ID because the document information is perpetuated through the document’s life cycle rather than in just one business process. The relationships between documents within a family (parent Document A and child Documents A1, A2, and A3) are available when a user searches for documents using tracking information as the search criteria.