Designing Mediation Flows

You can design mediation flows from the top down, or from the bottom up. That is, you can start with interfaces and mediation flows, or you can start by designing composites and components.

If you start with interfaces, you can create mediation flows from the interfaces. If you start with components, you can assign a mediation flow as the implementation of the component after specifying the services and references in the Composite editor.

  1. Create an ActiveMatrix SOA project and import the WSDL files.
  2. Virtualize interfaces.
    1. Create a mediation flow.
    2. Specify the mediation and target interfaces.
    3. Create mediation paths.
  3. Select a mediation patterns.
    The most cited ESB (mediation) patterns are these:
    • VETO (Validate, Enhance, Transform, Operate)
    • VETRO (Validate, Enrich, Transform, Route, Operate)

    Mediation provides the Validate, Transform and Route tasks.

    The Enrich task can be achieved using the Query DB task, the Invoke Operation task, or a customer-created task.

    The Operate task makes the target service call.

  4. Configure mediation patterns using tasks.
    • Add and remove tasks.
    • Configure task properties.
    • Handle faults.
  5. Bind and deploy.
    • Create composite and components.
    • Specify bindings.
    • Assemble and run.
Note: Before you package and deploy your project, ensure that all validation errors are resolved. An error icon appears on the operation name of mediation interfaces with errors.

Errors occur because of an invalid configuration. Each error is logged on the Problems tab of the mediation flow.

For more information about the process of designing a mediation flow, consult these resources:

  • Composite Development Guide describes the first step in the process, creating the project and obtain the interfaces.
  • Working with Mediation Flows describes steps 2 through step 4a in more detail.
  • Composite Development Guide describes how to create service assemblies for deployment and execution.
  • Administration Guide describes how to deploy and run your project.