Back Forward Integration — Concepts and terms

Concepts and terms

Most applications require access to data or computations that are provided by another system, or need to respond to requests from other systems for data or computations.

PRPC offers many approaches, technologies, and facilities collectively known as Integration. (Internally, these facilities are in the Pega-IntSvcs RuleSet.) They include:

Like most other facilities, these are rule-based, allowing evolutionary development. Many types of integration can be achieved quickly, with modest development effort.

Connectors

Rule types provide direct support for these protocols and technologies:

Services

Similarly, rule types for services cover 14 protocols and technologies:

How connectors work

Connector interfaces consist of a call or outgoing message (known as the request), followed by a return or arriving message, known as the response. You can parse, convert, and map data in either direction to or from the clipboard.

Arriving information can be an XML file format (and accepted by the Parse XML rule), in a fixed record structure (accepted by the Parse Structured rule), or a text file with input fields separated by a tab character or other specific characters (accepted by the Parse Delimited rule).

Your flows can include Integrator shapes, which execute activities that use connector rules to gather data or request processing from another system.

For most connector types, you can simulate the operation of a connector before you build the connector. This allows your application development and testing to proceed when the external system is unavailable or is difficult to test with. See Creating connector simulators.

Mapping and Resources

Several rule types facilitate two-way mapping between property values (on a requestor clipboard) and the messages, records, or structures used by the external system or technology. These rule type belong to the Integration-Mapping category. See Data mapping in services and connectors — Concepts and terms.

Resource identifiers — such as URLs, port numbers, usernames, passwords, and the like — may vary between a development or test environment and a production system, and may change during the operation of a production system. Such information is usually better stored in data instances, rather than rules. The data classes belong to the Integration-Resources category.

Landing pages

Four Integration landing pages provide access to integration rules and resources:

Correspondence

PRPC can communicate with a PegaDISTRIBUTION Manager system to print or fax outgoing correspondence.

Topics Integration Examples — StockTrader portal
Integration-Connectors category
Integration-Mapping category
Integration-Resources category
Integration-Services category
Definitions listener, Single Sign-on, SnapStart, LDAP-based Authentication

UpConcepts