Understanding webMethods Trading Networks

A trading network is a group of organizations that have agreed to exchange business documents. Participants might include strategic partners, buyers, suppliers, and marketplaces (for example, Ariba Network), and are referred to as trading partners. Business documents typically include purchase orders, order statuses, purchase order acknowledgements, invoices, and other domain-specific business documents.

webMethods Trading Networks enables your corporation to connect to other organizations to form a business-to-business (B2B) trading network. Through Trading Networks, your organization can exchange business documents with the partners in your network to relay production information. The business documents can be in any format that is recognized by two partners, such as XML or flat file. Trading Networks is also the base through which webMethods products support numerous eBusiness Standards (eStandards) such as RosettaNet, EDI, ebXML Messaging Service, SWIFT, FIX, and CIDX.

My webMethods is a Web-based user interface framework that supports administration and monitoring user interfaces for webMethods products. The Trading Networks user interface in My webMethods lets you perform all Trading Networks tasks.

Administrators use permissions to control the data you can view in My webMethods and the actions you can take against the data. If you do not have certain permissions, My webMethods might not display pages, buttons, or other user interface controls required to perform the actions described in this guide. If a procedure instructs you to perform an action that is not available, ask an administrator to grant you the permissions needed to perform the action.

The Trading Networks database stores all information about the trading network, such as partner information, types of documents to process, processing actions, and log activity. When you monitor Trading Networks assets, you can work with the Trading Networks production database or the Trading Networks database to which production data has been archived (that is, the Trading Networks archive database).

This section briefly explains assets and processing you must understand to perform the tasks in this guide.

The following table describes the assets:

Some documents might require multi-step processing that involves interaction among systems, people, and trading partners. An example of such processing is the fulfillment of a purchase order that includes a purchase order document, human interaction to determine whether to approve the purchase order, and either an order acknowledgment (ACK) document or an order negative acknowledgement (NACK) document. For such processing, you can define a business process, and you can use the business process instead of or in addition to a processing rule. For complete information on business processes, see the webMethods BPM documentation.

Trading Networks processes documents as follows:

1. A document enters the Trading Networks system (for example, a partner sends a document).
2. Trading Networks compares the document to defined document types until it finds a match. This is called document recognition.
3. Trading Networks extracts document attributes from the document and performs any pre-processing actions that are defined in the document type.
4. If the document type indicates to use a processing rule for the document, Trading Networks compares the document to your defined processing rules until it finds a match. Trading Networks then performs the pre-processing and processing actions defined in the processing rule.

   If the rule defines an action to execute a service, and the action uses reliable execution to make repeated attempts, Trading Networks creates a service execution task to keep track of the attempts.

   If the rule defines an action to deliver a document, and the action uses reliable delivery to make repeated attempts, Trading Networks creates a delivery task to keep track of the attempts.

If a document matches no or multiple document types, the document is considered to have an unknown document type. Since document types identify the attributes to extract from a document, Trading Networks cannot extract attributes from a document whose document type is unknown. However, if you have a processing rule that processes unknown document types, Trading Networks does try to process the document using that rule.

If a document was sent by one of your partners but Trading Networks cannot determine the sender (for example, because the document type is unknown and the document sender attribute could not be extracted), the sender is considered an unknown partner. If you have a processing rule that processes documents that are sent by the partner, the document will not match the rule and the document will not be processed.

You can view the following for documents:

• Document attributes and content.
• Delivery and service execution tasks that are associated with documents.
• Log entries that describe the processing performed for the document.
• Comments associated with documents. You can also add or update comments.

If an administrator has saved a document to the Trading Networks database, you can send it through your Trading Networks system again. You might want to send a document through the system again in these cases:

• A document might encounter problems during document recognition or attribute extraction (for example, a document might have an unknown document type). You can address any issues (for example, ask an administrator to create a matching document type) and then resubmit the document. Trading Networks creates a new instance of the document and sends the new instance through the entire processing described in Assets and Processing. (The original document remains unchanged.)
• A document might need different rule processing than it received (for example, the document might have been processed by the wrong rule, or you might want to change the user status and send the document through the system again). You can address any issues (for example, ask an administrator to create a new processing rule) and then reprocess the document. When you reprocess a document, Trading Networks uses the document type it already matched to the document and the document attributes it already extracted from the document, but it compares the document to the processing rules again and reprocesses the document using the matching rule.
• View documents that are related in some way (related documents), as follows:
  • Trading Networks automatically relates documents that are part of a business process.
  • When you resubmit a document, Trading Networks automatically relates the new instance it creates to the original document.
  • You can ask an administrator or developer to manually relate documents to one another; for example, you might want to relate a purchase order you received to the acknowledgment you sent in response. An administrator or developer can relate documents using the wm.tn.doc:relateDocuments built-in service.

You can view information about delivery tasks and service execution tasks, including status, and you can manage tasks as described in the following table:

If an administrator had Trading Networks save a document to its database and write activity log entries for the document, Trading Networks recorded entries throughout document processing to its activity log. You can view the activity log in My webMethods.

The Integration Server server log contains information about operations and errors that occur on Integration Server, such as the starting of subsystems and the loading of packages. Trading Networks writes log entries directly to the server log of its host Integration Server. You can activate or deactivate logging and specify the amount of detail to write to the server log. For complete information, see the webMethods Audit Logging Guide.