Integrating with an ECM system or a BPM document store

Use a service to allow a business process developed in IBM® Process Designer to work with an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system or a BPM document store.

Before you begin

If you are working with an external ECM system, you should have added your Enterprise Content Management (ECM) servers to your process application as shown in Adding an Enterprise Content Management server. You don't need to define your server to work with one of built-in stores, such as the BPM managed store, BPM content store, BPM document store, and BPM target store.

You should add the Content Management (SYSCM) toolkit to your dependencies, if it has not been added as you will need access to the ECM types. To add this toolkit dependency, select + beside TOOLKITS. In the Add dependency menu, select the Content Management toolkit version you require.

About this task

To build a service that integrates with an ECM system or a BPM document store, follow these steps:

Procedure

  1. Create a service that contains a Content Integration step:
    • In Process Designer, click Services and create a service flow.
    • To create a heritage human service in Process Designer, click User Interface > Heritage Human Service.
    • In the desktop Process Designer, select a service from the library area that supports Content Integration steps. The following services contain a Content Integration step.
      • Click + next to Implementation, and select Integration Service
      • Click + next to User Interface, and select Ajax Service.
      • Click + next to User Interface, and select Heritage Human Service.

      Enter a name for the service and click Finish. The editor opens with the Diagram view in focus.

  2. Add a Content Integration step to the canvas and provide a meaningful name for it.
  3. Under Properties, click Implementation. Under Enterprise Content Management Server, <Use data mapping> is the default selection in the Server field. It means that in the Data Mapping section, the Server name input map is enabled and editable. You can pass a server name by using a variable in that field.

    Alternatively, you can select one of the following server types in the Server field.

    • BPM managed store
    • BPM content store (deprecated)
    • BPM document store
    • BPM target store
    • The name of an ECM server

    If you want to select the name of an ECM server but no ECM servers are available for selection, you can add a server in the Process App Settings editor. See Adding an Enterprise Content Management server.

  4. Under Content Operation, select an appropriate ECM operation. See Outbound operations for external ECM systems and BPM stores.
  5. Click Data Mapping. In this section you can create the map between the variables for input and output. These variables need to be created. You can create them manually by yourself or use the auto-map function. The auto-map function creates private variables for the business objects, which are used by the service you create. To create these private variables, click the auto-map icon Auto-map function.
    The mapping structure for each operation is discussed in Data mapping in Enterprise Content Management operations.
    Note: To use the auto-map function, you must be in the desktop Process Designer.
  6. Click Save or Finish Editing.
    For details about declaring variables for the client-side human services, see Declaring variables

What to do next

As with any service, if you have errors at run time, use catching error events to handle errors thrown by a content integration step. A content integration step may raise an error with error code ECMError and error data of type ECMError. See Handling errors in services.