To reuse an automation service that was created outside IBM Business Automation Studio, you create an external automation
service and publish an IBM Business
Automation Workflow or
OpenAPI external automation service. The service operations can then be discovered and reused
easily.
Before you begin
For a Business Automation Workflow
automation service, ensure your process app that contains the service is installed on the server
that you will connect to so you can discover the automation service.
Procedure
To publish an external automation service, complete the following steps:
-
From the Business Automation
Studio home page, select
Business automations and click .
-
Create a connection to the server where the automation service is installed, so that you can
discover the automation service. You can create a connection once and reuse it when you create an
external automation service that is deployed to the same server.
Note: For the username and password, provide the service credentials (functional ID and password)
for the server where the automation service is installed. If you don't have these credentials,
contact your account administrator to get them and ensure that the credentials have the permissions
to work with the automation service.
-
When the connection to the server is established successfully, you can view the operations that
are available and select the ones that you want to publish.
When a workflow automation service exposes a process, the process is long running, which means
that the process starts when the automation service runs, but outputs are not returned from the
automation service. If you want the outputs returned from the automation service, use a service flow
instead.
Important: You can't update the credentials to the external automation system after the
connection is established. If the credentials change on the external system, you must create a new
connection with the updated credentials.
-
Give your service a name and description, and publish it. A project is created, with the
operations and business objects that are needed as inputs and outputs of the operations. When its
done, you'll see the service in the list of published services.
- Click the service to view the operations.
Results
The published service is now available for a business developer to discover and call and is
deployed to the development environment.