Building an integration service

Build an integration service when you want a flow to interact with an external system.

1. Open the Process Designer desktop editor.
2. Open a process application in the Designer view.
3. In New Service, enter a name for the service and click Finish. IBM Process Designer displays the diagram of the service with the default Start Event and End Event components.
4. Select the Variables tab, and add the variables that your integration service will use as input or output and also add private variables that the service will use. See Declaring variables for a BPD or a service in Process Designer for information.
5. Select the Diagram tab, and add the appropriate components to the service and then connect the components to create the flow. For information about the components that you can add to the diagram, see Service components in Process Designer. In particular, add one or more of the following components:
   • Web Service Integration component. For information about integrating web services, see Creating outbound integrations to web services.
   • Java Integration component.
   • Nested service component by dragging an integration service or other service onto the diagram. This action attaches the service to the component.
   • Content Integration component. For information about this component and how to configure it, see Building a service that integrates with an ECM system or the IBM BPM document store.
   Tip: You can also use the Invoke UCA component for integration. See Undercover agents.
6. Configure the components in the flow. For the integration components listed in the previous step, configure them so that they interact with the external system. In particular, for the Web Service Integration, Java Integration, Content Integration, and nested service components, map the data used in the task flow to the input and output for the component:
   1. Click the Data Mapping option in the properties. Because you already created the input and output variables for the nested service, the Data Mapping tab includes these variables.
   2. From the Input Mapping section, you can map each variable using one of the following ways:
      • Use to suggest mappings. If the automatic mapper does not find a variable, you can create a private variable for the mapping.
      • Use and then select the appropriate variable.
   3. In the Output Mapping section, do similar mappings for the output variables.
7. If you want the results of the service to be cached for unique combinations of input parameter values, enable and configure the service result cache.
   1. Select the Overview tab, then in the Service Result Cache section, select Enable caching of service results. The cache configuration fields are displayed.
      Restriction: The service result cache setting works only for top-level services that are called directly. If a service is called within another service, the cache setting does not apply.
   2. By default, when caching is enabled, the results for each combination of input parameter values are kept in the cache for 12 hours. To change the caching period, in the Cache results for section, use the Days, Hours, Minutes, and Seconds fields to select the duration that you want.
      Important: You might be able to improve the performance of some services by using the cache, however you must take care when you decide how long to cache results for, and might need to tune the size of the cache to avoid memory problems. By default, the cache stores up to 4096 results. You can change the size of the cache by setting a different value for <service-result-cache-size> in the 100Custom.xml file, inside the <server merge="mergeChildren"> section.