EEM - External Event Management

EEM - External Event Management is one of the complementary modules of itmSUITE®. The module is aimed to enable interactions between itmSUITE® and third party applications (interfaces). The supported direction of the data flow is from the external application to itmSUITE® (input). It is possible to define and implement outbound data flow and interfaces by using the action engine component of the itmSUITE®.

Introduction

The module can receive information (inbound messages) with two modes which may be activated at the same time:

• Active channel
• Passive channel

Active channel

In this mode data acquisition is made by means of mails. EEM verifies at regular intervals the existence of mail messages in a configured mailbox and processes them when found.

Passive channel

In this mode, EEM makes available web services in order to acquire data.

EEM processing steps

EEM works on inbound messages received by means of the active or passive channel through a three steps process:

1. EEM processes and validates the incoming message
2. EEM passes processed messages to message bus which, in turn, dispatches them to the recipients (the modules configured to subscribe to the message)
3. itmSUITE® recipient module performs the configured tasks for the received message by means of the action engine

The above mentioned three steps process is illustrated in the figure below.

EEM inbound schema

EEM configuration

The following paragraphs gives an overview of EEM configuration.

Active channel configuration

The steps to properly configure active channels are:

• Define one or more active channel
• Configure a monitoring system configuration (MSC) for validation

Definition of active channels

Using EEM menu Active Notification Channels it is possible to define an active channel which is mapped on an existing mailbox.

The image below shown the parameters needed to configure an active channel.

EEM Active channel

The following parameters shall be provided:

Definition of monitoring system configurations

An MSC (Monitoring System Configuration) is composed by General and Parameter informations.

The image below shown the General tab used by the system to validate the incoming data

EEM MSC General Configuration

The image below shown the Parameter tab used by the system to collect information present on a message.

EEM MSC Parameter Configuration

One message is validated if the Identification Strategy is respected and all the parameters are presents into the body of message

Passive channel

When itmSUITE® is called from third parites system is necessary to define the validation rule using the MSC (monitoring sytem configuration) session.

In this case, a client call is accepted if the Request Identification tag and the expected Parameters are properly passed into the SOAP message.

The image below shown a MSC (monitoring sytem configuration) configuration session.

EEM Passive Configuraiton

Action Engine Configuration

When the incoming message is validated by EEM, the informations are sent to MB (Message Bus) that dispatch it to the itmSUITE® Action engine and a configured Action is activated.

Action Engine enabled the user to configured an Action and the activation condition. An action is composed by:

• General Information
• Trigger and Activation condition
• Parameters
• Tasks to execute

the following images shown the action' user interface and provide some more detail about this functionality

Action Configuration

Condition'tab enable the user to define a Boolean condition that should be verify before activate the action' . Generally the conditions works on input Parameter.

Action Configuration

Tasks tab enable the user to define one or more task that will be executed sequentially if the condition is valid. The system manage different type of task, the most flexible and powerful is Scripting task, based on Javascript framework, enable the user to call itmSUITE® primitive

Action Task Configuration

Outbound Comunication

itmSUITE® module can send information towards third parties software using scripting tasks. This can be performed:

• Sending a preformatted mail
• Calling a third parties web services

Action Task Configuration