Service providers and service provider discovery

A service provider is a container or collection of resources that is hosted by a tool or product. Service providers support the grouping of similar resources, such as defects or tasks, that can be configured for integration.

A service provider in an OSLC provider application contains the resource data that can be linked to consumer application data through integration of the applications. The resource data in IBM® TRIRIGA® can be in multibyte languages. To integrate a consumer application and a provider application, the consumer must discover or identify the service providers that are available in the provider application.

In IBM TRIRIGA, a service provider can be simple or as complex as an application that contains many modules and business objects. You can discover the service providers in IBM TRIRIGA by using the following methods:

  • From Tools > System Setup > Integration > OSLC Manager
  • By using the URI: http://yourserver/oslc/sp

With each method, a list of service providers is returned. The following example shows the URI for employees: http://yourserver/oslc/sp/Employee.

The URI points to the service provider document that is in RDF/XML format. RDF/XML format is supported for shape documents, service providers, resources, and resource data. The consumer application can use the service provider form to determine which resources are available and what services they support, such as query or creation.

The OSLC service provider supports the OSLC creation factory and query capability operations that provide consumers with the URI to create or search resources that are supported by the service provider. The service provider document describes the available resources and the namespace mappings, and the operations that are supported by the service provider for those resources.

In the following sample response, the OSLC service provider is referred from the rdfs:member property. The service provider document for the domain shows the URI for work task:
<rdf:RDF>
<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://yourserver/oslc/sp">
<rdfs:member rdf:resource="http://yourserver/oslc/sp/WorkTask">
</rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>