Providing workflow automation services

Create an exposed automation service to reuse a business function that is implemented using a process or a service flow. Then, publish the exposed automation service in IBM Business Automation Studio so other business applications (applications), business automations (automations), and external clients can discover and call it.

About this task

An exposed automation service has one or many operations that expose business functions that are implemented as processes or service flows. You can use existing implementations or create new ones. After you finish implementing exposed automation services, you can publish them in Business Automation Studio.
The mapping between process and service flow artifacts and the resulting automation service in Business Automation Studio is as follows:
  • For each automation service published in Business Automation Studio, there is an exposed automation service with the same name as defined in the designer.
  • Each operation of the published automation service has a corresponding operation of the same name in the exposed REST or Kafka automation service, with a service flow or a process as the implementation of the operation. The input and output parameters of the resulting automation service operations match the inputs and outputs in the service flow interface or process interface.
  • You publish the entire workflow automation, not the individual exposed REST or Kafka automation services that are contained in the workflow automation. That is, when you publish a workflow automation, all the exposed REST or Kafka automation services are added to Business Automation Studio.

Procedure

To create an exposed automation service:

  1. Open your workflow automation that contains your process or service flow.
  2. Create a new exposed REST or Kafka service. For more information about REST or Kafka services and how to create them, see Creating a REST service or Creating a Kafka service.
  3. Optional: Create a version.
    You can now publish the automation service.
  4. Publish the workflow automation service:
    1. From the Business Automation Studio home page, select Automations.
    2. Select the workflow automation that contains the exposed automation services that you want to publish.
      Publishing a version of a workflow automation publishes all the automation services in it. To see the services in a particular version, select the Automation Services tab.
    3. On the Versions tab, click the three-dot menu of the version you want to publish and select Publish. To publish a workflow automation service you don't yet have a version for, click the three-dot menu next to Open in the header area. A version is created for you and then it is published.

Results

After you publish the automation, you'll see its automation services in the Published automation services list. The published automation services are now available for a business developer to discover and call from an automation or application. See Calling an automation service from a workflow automation and Calling automation services from an application.