Triggering Overview

You can use Triggering if another site or application must be notified when an event occurs in LN.

For that purpose, the Triggering (TRG) module is available in the Data Director (da) package.

This module is a small component in LN that does the following:

  • Receives an event.
  • Checks whether the event meets certain conditions.
  • Takes a predefined action.

IMPORTANT TERMS

Term Description
Event An event is a message that states that something happened. An event can for example be the creation of a new sales order, the change of a price, or the receipt of a payment. In addition to the type of event, the event also contains data related to the event, such as the identifier of the object on which the event occurred, for example, an order number, and the data that was changed. For more information on events, refer to Chapter 3, "Event handling" in the User's Guide for Triggering.
Condition Conditions are used because not all events are valid. For example, notification of a newly created order might only be required if the order is entered manually. Notification of a change might only be required if a particular status is reached.
Action The action describes what you must do if an event occurs. This can, for example, be the execution of a program or the creation of an XML file that the receiving application can pick up.

ORIGIN OF EVENTS

An event can be generated from multiple sources, such as the following:

  • LN sessions can create events: This requires a customization of these sessions. This type of customization can be either visible to the user, for example, by adding a button to a session, or invisible, for example, by adding lines to a program script that creates an event if a specific situation occurs.
  • Change events for created, changed, or deleted objects can be created from the Exchange module. In case of deleted objects, an exchange job runs regularly to collect changes on LN data and creates an event for each of these changes. The changes are collected from the audit trail.
  • You can use the triggering mechanism to synchronize regularly complete data sets, because the Exchange module can regularly read a specific set of data and create the corresponding events that describe the current status of the data. You can use this method to notify another application or site from the current status of the data set, if the data set is small. For this reason, keeping track of the changes is not worthwhile.
  • You can generate events using a timer. As a result, an event occurs regularly, irrespective of the LN application or LN data. In that case, the action must specify what must happen.

RUNTIME ACTIONS

The following example illustrates what happens at runtime in the exchange-based scenario:

  1. Changes are made to the OLTP (online transaction processing) database by users or by other processes that result in changes.
  2. Changes on relevant tables are logged in the audit trail.
  3. The exchange process runs regularly in a job.
  4. The exchange process picks up the changes from the audit trail and processes the changes according to the defined scheme.
  5. The exchange scheme creates XML events for the changes and forwards these to the triggering component.
  6. The triggering component receives the event, checks what action must be carried out upon that event and performs this action.

RELATION WITH Workflow

You can use the Triggering module to trigger business processes in Workflow. In that case, you can use the Workflow Management (tgwfm) sessions to generate the Exchange schemes and triggers. For details, refer to the Workflow online Help and to the User Manuals for the Workflow Extension for LN.

SESSIONS

The triggering solution consists of the following sessions:

  • Triggers (datrg1100m000)
  • Print Triggers (datrg1400m000)
  • Configure Trigger Conditions (datrg1110m000)
  • Configure Fan Out Action (datrg1120m000)
  • Configure XML File Action (datrg1225m000)
  • Start Triggering via Job Timer (datrg1200m000)
  • Export Triggers (daxch0135m000)
  • Print Export Triggers (daxch0435m000)

MORE INFORMATION

For detailed information on the Triggering module, refer to the User's Guide for Triggering.

For information on the scripts that are used in the triggering module, refer to:

  • To configure an attached condition script
  • To configure an attached action script
  • Transformation script