Dealing with Integrations of systems

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Most IT applications will involve some kind of integration with an external system. This external system can be a database or any other application. The communication between systems determines how well the overall system performs. Integrations are crucial links and help us leverage the capabilities of different systems effectively. But, these integration points are vulnerable and information can be lost if all possible scenarios are not addressed. There are basically 2 scenarios that happen when a request is placed to a system-

  • Response (System responds)
  • No response

 Response can be further broken down to-
  • Positive Acknowledgement with Data
  • Negative Acknowledgement with Data

 Data- Data can be send with any/both of the responses.

Whenever, there is no response from a system, there is loss of data. To retrieve the data we may have to send another request. This is where exception scenarios come and they need to be defined. The following can help us defining the scenarios:
  • When do you say there is no response?
  • What is wait time for receiving a response?
  • What should be done if we do not get a response?
  • Should we retry or do some other activity?
  • If retrying what is the number of retries?
  • What happens if we still do not get a response even after the defined number of retries?
In BPM, we have process/work flows. It is always good to have a separate exception workflow so that all exceptions can be handled there.

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