Implementing Business Process Integration (Import)

Scenario: TIBCO Business Studio is not yet the primary corporate modeling tool.

Goal: To leverage the investment in the current Business Process Analysis (BPA) tool by importing existing processes into TIBCO Business Studio and getting the processes into an executable form.

To import a process from an established BPA tool into TIBCO Business Studio, you must do the following:

Procedure

  1. Study the selected BPA tool, particularly the XML export facility.
  2. Identify the significant elements in the BPA tool’s XML format.
  3. Referring to Understanding the Process Package File Format, familiarize yourself with the XPDL format and the TIBCO extensions.
  4. Construct a mapping table (for example, a spreadsheet) between the interesting elements. This will be the basis of the XSLT that will transform elements from the BPA XML output into XPDL that can be imported into TIBCO Business Studio.
  5. Implement the mapping in XSLT.
    Tip: For an example of a mapping XSLT, navigate to studio/3.7/studio-addins/eclipse/plugins sub-directory of your Eclipse installation. Using WinZip, open the file com.tibco.xpd.aris_x.y.z.jar. This archive contains a file called ARISXML_2_XPDL2.xslt that contains the mappings that TIBCO Business Studio uses for the import of Aris models.
  6. Register the XSLT as a plug-in that may be distributed to all users (by copying to the plugins directory) or installed directly. See Creating an XSLT-Based Import Export Wizard.