Artifacts imported from IBM WebSphere Business Modeler

IBM WebSphere Business Modeler exports SCA artifacts and BPEL, WSDL, and XSD files that can be imported into IBM Integration Designer to create an implementation for IBM BPM.

What you import into IBM Integration Designer is not the model itself, but the model transformed into artifacts that can be used by IBM Integration Designer. Here are the principal artifacts that will be imported into the workspace.

• Service Component Architecture artifacts
• Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) processes

• Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interfaces
• Business objects (XSD files)
• Human tasks (Task Execution Language (TEL) files)
• Business rules (business rules groups (BRG) and business rule sets (RULESET))
• Timetables (TT files imported as business calendars)
• IBM Forms

Not all of these implementations are equally supported by the synchronization tools in IBM Integration Designer.

For example, changes to business rules in IBM WebSphere Business Modeler are identified in the comparisons made by the synchronization tools and they can be merged into the IBM Integration Designer workspace. However, the change report that is generated is not complete. Conditions and actions attached to a business rule are exported to IBM Integration Designer as Java™ objects. However, if the condition or action is changed in Integration Designer, there is a limitation on what is reported in the change report that is generated. The report indicates that the condition or action has changed, but the report should not be modified. A warning alerts you if you are trying to modify a calendar that was generated by IBM WebSphere Business Modeler.

Similarly, some aspects related to human tasks are not fully traceable. When you create a model, you can associate a timetable with a human task. That timetable can be imported into IBM Integration Designer and it can be used there as a business calendar, but it cannot be altered after it is imported.

State machines, Java classes, and WSDL bindings are not compared or automatically merged.

Business items and business objects

Business items in IBM WebSphere Business Modeler become business objects in IBM Integration Designer. The business item is slightly different from the business object. A business item can contain multiple objects (1 ... n), so all the fields of a customer record, for example, could be in one business item. A business object in IBM Integration Designer can only be one object, so the fields of a customer record would become multiple objects (name.xsd, street.xsd, town.xsd). If you import the multipart customer record business item into IBM Integration Designer, it becomes several business objects (one for name, one for street, and so on).

When you import an .xsd file into IBM WebSphere Business Modeler, it is received as a business service object to distinguish it from the artifacts that are native to the model. The business service object maintains the original .xsd definition.

When you are working iteratively between IBM WebSphere Business Modeler and IBM Integration Designer, the tools in each product can interpret the structure being used by the other product. However, you need to understand what is happening to correctly merge iterations of the model into your workspace. See the example about custom matching in Merging changes from the model into the workspace to see how to handle the merge operation.

Developing an application from a model

Related tasks:
Associating artifacts to be compared