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Use

You can use the Data Orchestration Engine (DOE) to exchange data with multiple back ends.

Consider this scenario: In a utilities industry, a service professional is responsible for various energy suppliers. The person has to take measurements for these energy suppliers, for example, electricity meter readings. Each energy supplier has its own back-end system. The service professional enters data on a mobile device, and this has to be sent to the corresponding back-end system of the energy supplier to whom the respective customer is contracted. The service professional has to access only one application on a mobile client to get the service orders from different energy suppliers.

Figure 1: Scenario for using multiple back-end systems

This scenario can be implemented in the DOE using the concept of Gateways . A gateway is a logical entity between a back-end system and the DOE. In the DOE, a back-end gateway is identified by a gateway ID and an alias name. In technical terms, a gateway is a combination of the following:

  • RFC connection

  • Back-end adapter

By assigning gateways to data object instances, you maintain the information about which back-end system a data object instance belongs to.

Properties of a Back-End Gateway

A back-end gateway defines how data object instances must be routed between the back-end systems and the mobile devices. Listed below is the behavior during data download and data upload of the instances:

  • Downloading instances from the back-end system.

    This depends on the type of back-end adapters associated with the data objects:

    • DOE-triggered adapters

      The instances are downloaded by the DOE for each gateway. During download, the DOE maps the gateway ID to the corresponding instance.

    • Back-end triggered adapters

      The back-end system sends the instances along with the gateway ID.

  • Uploading instances to the back-end system:

    • In the DOE, you define rules and dependencies for the gateways. Based on these rules, you determine where to route the data. For example, if you define a rule that a customer called Itelo belongs to back-end system A , then all data object instances containing the customer Itelo are routed only to back-end system A .