Most applications require access to data or computations that are provided by another system, or applications need to respond to requests from other systems for data or computations. The approaches, technologies, and facilities that support accessing data are collectively known as integration services. (These facilities are in the Pega-IntSvcs ruleset.)
Integration services include:
Rule types provide direct support for the following protocols and technologies:
Important: The rule type Rule-Connect-BPEL is deprecated. As appropriate, migrate to Service SOAP rules.
Similarly, rule types for services cover the following protocols and technologies:
Important: The rule type Rule-Service-BPEL is deprecated. As appropriate, migrate to Service SOAP rules.
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.
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, user names, and passwords, might vary between a development or test environment and a production system, and might 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.
Three Integration landing pages provide access to integration rules and resources: