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Architectural Components

This section describes the major parts of Fulfillment Provisioning and how they relate to each other. Several architectural components operate on order data that is structured as follows:

•	Each unit of work as received from a service management application is represented as a service order.

•	Each service order is made up of one or more product orders.

•	Fulfillment Provisioning decomposes product orders into technical product orders.

•	Each technical product order is described by an execution sequence of work orders. A work order is the smallest unit of work defined in Fulfillment Provisioning.

The architectural components of Fulfillment Provisioning that work on order data are:

•	Provisioning flow: Is made up of standard Streams modules and special Fulfillment Provisioning Streams modules.

•	Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog: Used to decompose product orders into corresponding technical product orders and to arrange and sequence them according to defined rules.

•	Fulfillment Provisioning Administrator: Provides administrative access to the provisioning flow, Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog, and cartridges being used.

•	Cartridges: Execute work orders on actual service elements.

The following figure shows these components and their relationships to each other and to the external system.

Figure 2. Fulfillment Provisioning Architecture Overview

Provisioning Flow

The provisioning flow is a Streams application. It contains general-purpose Streams modules such as reservoirs, flow controllers, and terminators. In addition, it also contains special-purpose Fulfillment Provisioning modules. Fulfillment Provisioning modules include drivers, composer/responder pairs, Service Order Processing(SOP), Product Order Processing (POP), checkpoint handling, and other pre-built or custom-built modules.

For provisioning flow details, see the Streams and Provisioning Flow section in TIBCO Fulfillment Provisioning Developers Guide.

Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog

Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog accepts a service order with attached product orders. It decomposes the product orders into corresponding technical product orders. Subsequently, the catalog produces a set of fully populated, sequenced, mapped, routed product orders defining the provisioning tasks that need to be performed. The Service Order Processing (SOP) module, which is a part of the Provisioning Flow, invokes Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog.

The way that Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog transforms product orders into a set of technical product orders is fully configurable.

For Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog details, see TIBCO Fulfillment Provisioning Developers Guide .

Administrator

The administrator provides administrative access to Fulfillment Provisioning elements and cartridges that are installed. The administrator is accessed from a Web browser. The access to specific elements will depend on the security definitions configured for the system.

Cartridges

Cartridges provide a framework to manage connections with lower level network elements, or session layers, such as, Voicemails, Intelligent Network and so on. They provide an interface between Fulfillment Provisioning and network elements. Fulfillment Provisioning decomposes high level orders to low level orders and sends them to Cartridges. Subsequently, cartridges translate these tasks into concrete messages and sends them to specific network elements.

Cartridges accommodate any kind of network element. For example, UDP, TCP, Telnet, and HTTP adapters.

Fulfillment Provisioning provides a web interface as well as a command-line interface to maintain cartridges. For more information on using managing cartridges, refer to Cartridge Maintenance Commands. For more information on maintaining cartridges using the user interface, refer to Maintaining Cartridges.

States of a Cartridge

A cartridge in maintenance can be in any or all of the following three states: operational, administrative, and maintenance.

Property Type	Property Value	Property Description
Administrative	Locked/Unlocked	A cartridge in locked state prevents completion of ongoing work. A locked cartridge allows connectivity by enabling the cartridge, but it does not allow further order processing.
Operational	Enabled/Disabled	Represents the connection status of a network element . If configured to re-log automatically, the cartridge can switch between these states without using connectivity. A disabled cartridge loses its connectivity and as a result, is unable to process work orders.
Maintenance	In Maintenance/ Not In Maintenance	When in maintenance, a cartridge does not accept new work, but completes any ongoing work in the queue. In particular, "asynchronous" exchanges are completed.

 

When a disabled cartridge is enabled, the administrative and maintenance states helps decide the course of action on work orders. The following table illustrates how the work orders are handled:

Processing Asynchronous Orders

When a cartridge sends a request, but receives the response on a server started by the cartridge, the behavior is considered to be asynchronous. When in maintenance, asynchronous orders are processed on priority over new service orders. A cartridge processes asynchronous orders using the following steps:

Procedure 

1.	Fulfillment Provisioning sends a request to the cartridge to execute an order. Fulfillment Provisioning does not know whether or not the order is asynchronous.

2.	On receiving the request, the cartridge sends the request to the Network Element and notifies Fulfillment Provisioning that the response is delayed.

3.	Fulfillment Provisioning puts the higher level orders in a queue and waits for orders to complete.

4.	The cartridge receives a notification when an order is complete that is further relayed to Fulfillment Provisioning.

5.	Fulfillment Provisioning acts on the dormant order and re-injects it in the cartridge for completion.

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