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When you configure consumer proxies, you can apply runtime configuration settings to multiple proxies at one go. To configure multiple consumers, you apply runtime configuration settings to the Service Groups of these consumer proxies. In this case, we can identify two roles in the configuration process flow:

Technical Administrator

The Technical Administrator knows which technical configuration settings or policies are required by the provider systems that host service definitions. He or she prepares the relevant configuration settings in one or more communication profiles in advance. The Technical Administrator uses the profiles to establish connections to multiple provider systems in the landscape.

A communication profile is a set of policies that need to be applied to a connection to a provider system. Apart of the communication profile concept as a placeholder of runtime settings for service definitions, you can think of it as a placeholder of the runtime settings that are required by the service definitions running on a provider system.

The Technical Administrator applies the configuration settings directly to the connections. More information: Connection to Provider Systems

Business Administrator

The Business Administrator decides which Service Groups in a consumer application or in a business scenario to configure and enables the corresponding applications to consume services on a provider system. The Business Administrator:

  • Prepares a collection of Service Groups in one or more logical units called business scenarios.

    A business scenario is a logical collection of Service Groups (and/or service definitions). You can think of a business scenario as a worklist containing the Service Groups and definitions necessary to complete part of or the whole business process.

  • Assigns the connections to provider systems prepared by the Technical Administrator to one or more Service Groups grouped in a business scenario or in a consumer application.

    By assigning a provider system connection to Service Groups, the Business Administrator configures the respective consumer proxies. This means that the Business Administrator triggers the creation of a logical port for every consumer proxy to whose Service Group he or she assigns a connection.

    When a connection is assigned to a Service Group, the system creates a logical port for the consumer proxy which contains the Service Group. The Business Administrator does not explicitly create the logical ports to the consumer proxies. The actual creation of logical ports is performed by a background process which runs when the assignment of the connection to the provider system is created or every time the business scenario is changed.

    More information: Modifying SOA Configuration Background Process Settings.

This graphic is explained in the accompanying text.

Application View for Configuration

Consumer applications are self-contained applications built with different tools (Composite Applications Framework, Web Dynpro, Visual Composer, Guided Procedures, Galaxy, and so on) that take part in a particular business case. Generally, the applications consume Web services running on a provider system. However, they may expose Web services to other consumers (CAF applications, for example).

The consumer applications have logical entities which contain information about the Web services that they consume. This information is collected in Service Groups. At runtime, the business administrator assigns a connection to a provider system to the Service Group and thus provides concrete details (policies and settings) about the particular provider system on which the services are running. As a next step, the system triggers a background process which creates the actual configuration entities on the client side.

Business Scenario View for Configuration

A business scenario is a logical group of consumer applications (and/or service definitions). You can think of a business scenario as a worklist containing the consumers (and/or providers) necessary to complete part of or the whole business process.

The Business Administrator collects the consumer applications into a business scenario. By assigning a provider system connection to the Service Groups of the respective consumers, he or she triggers a configuration process which runs in the background and configures the consumers grouped in a scenario . The result of the configuration is the creation of a logical port for each consumer proxy.