Creating Consumer Factories

Context

The consumer factory is the interface on consumer side that is used to establish a connection. It is linked to the semantic contract and its actor. At design time, the method of sender, receiver, and authentication determination is defined. When the consumer factory is instantiated, logical or technical determination of sender, receiver and authentication method and data take place, if applicable. With this information, the consumer factory gets an instance of the source consumer proxy, which it then uses to send out the request message. If a single-target consumer mapping has been used for the configuration of the logical port, in this step, the correct target proxy is used to send the message.

For more information about single-target consumer mappings, see Working with Consumer Mappings.

Note that the application can either know the sender and receiver IBCs or determine them using logical routing. This depends on the way the consumer factory is developed. Senders and receivers can be determined using filter structures and rules that are defined by the business administrator.

Procedure

Create a consumer factory using the Enterprise Services Wizard.

For more information, see Enterprise Services Wizard.
On the Detail View tab in the proxy editor, specify a semantic contract and an actor.
Specify the consumer that uses the consumer factory.
Specify how sender, receiver, and authentication are to be determined.

Sender, receiver, and authentication method and data can be determined through rules defined by the administrator to allow flexible routing of Web service calls. At runtime, the consumer application passes the business context to route the calls to the correct provider application and to transfer the correct sender application. The correct authentication method can be determined through rules as well. Technical determination determines the sender, receiver, and authentication data based on technical IDs that the application specifies. It is used by the Web service consumer application if the application knows which receiver to address and which sender to use. If the application has specified the sender, receiver, and authentication data using IDs within the consumer factory, the correct logical port can be found without rules.
Save the consumer factory and activate it.

If you activate the object, it is saved automatically. If you save it without activating, you can finalize and activate it at a later point in time.