Building SOA portfolio Business Services, part 5th: Using IBM WebSphere Business Modeler

This article is the fifth article in this series that discusses how to develop composite applications to support business services. The composite business services component meets the requirements of the service component architecture and is developed using an integrated toolset that includes IBM Websphere®business Modeler (WBM) and IBM WebSphere Integration Developer (W ID). The artifacts generated by these tools are run at the IBM WebSphere Process Server. This article describes best practices for modeling, assembling, and deploying business processes using WBM V6. In addition, this article will identify some of the gaps in WBM and WID integration, and illustrate the lessons learned in the example process modeling effort, based on one of the actual uses described in this article.

Introduction

WebSphere Business Modeler (WBM) Advanced Edition V6 supports business analysts to construct business models for composite business services (composite Business Service, CBS). Instead of falling into the technical details of software development. WBM also provides an export feature that converts its model artifacts to the IBM WebSphere integration Developer (WID) widget. WBM Advanced Edition can perform the following transformations:

Translating business processes into the Orchestration Execution language (Business process Execution Language,bpel) framework

Convert an interface to a Web Service Description Language (Web Services Description language,wsdl) file

Convert business items and other type definitions to XML Schema definitions (XML Schema definition,xsd) files and Business objects (Business object,bo) definitions

There are some challenges to translating business processes into BPEL frameworks. This article describes best practices for modeling, assembling, and deploying business processes using WBM V6. In addition, this article identifies some of the gaps in WBM and WID integration, and explains the lessons learned in sample process modeling work based on the actual use of the credit card application described in this article.

Introduction to examples of credit card application cases

The example implementation of the credit card application scenario (see Figure 1) demonstrates each of the best practices. In this use case, a bank customer uses the bank's portal to apply for a credit card product. The user interface (username interface,ui) invokes the BPEL process from the customer's profile to retrieve its social Security number (Social) to invoke the credit score service. Based on the credit records returned by the service, the credit card request is automatically rejected, approved, or forwarded to the manager for manual review. A business rule set is used to control decisions based on credit records. If the request is automatically rejected, the status is logged and a notification is sent to the customer. If automatic approval is requested, the status is logged, the credit card issuing process is initiated, and a notification is sent to the customer. If manual approval is necessary, a second workflow will be started (as shown in Figure 2).

Figure 1. Credit card application process in WBM

Note: A larger view of Figure 1 is provided.

When a credit card application requires manual approval, bank employees will review additional information about the applicant and the product. The bank employee will then approve or reject the application. If the request is rejected, the request is logged and a notification is sent to the customer. If the application is approved, the decision (implemented through the business rules) determines whether the bank manager is still required for approval. If not required, the application status is logged, the credit card issuance process is initiated, and notifications are sent to the customer. If Bank manager approval is required, the approval results of the bank employee are recorded and the application is sent to the bank manager. The bank manager approves or rejects the application. The bank manager's decision is recorded and a notification is sent to the customer.

Figure 2. Credit card approval process

Note: A larger view of Figure 2 is provided.