LANSA Composer is designed to be used by business analysts to design and implement solutions to integration problems. It is not necessary to write program code to use Composer in solutions that involve standard transport and transformation activities. The implementation of the transport and transformation activities and the orchestration of them in business processes is all accomplished using highly-visual graphical interfaces.

LANSA Composer can, however, be extended to encompass custom business processing.  One way to do is by calling existing code.  You can call LANSA functions, 3GL programs, Java programs and scripts such as Ruby.  If the code units already exist, then the calls can be accomplished by a business analyst level user without programming.

Another way to extend LANSA Composer is by writing activities to encapsulate the custom processing. This is a straightforward programming task.  Once these are defined in LANSA Composer as Activities, they are orchestrated in the same way as supplied transport activities and transformations.

LANSA Composer enables you to:

• Exchange business information and transactions in common and agreed formats with trading partners, internal business units and/or other business applications on the same or different computing platforms.

• Transform business information between XML, EDI, Microsoft Excel 2007 (XSLX), text and database formats, including the capability to invoke web services, whether they be publicly available, published by trading partners or within your organization for internal consumption

• Orchestrate the transport, transformation and other activities, pass variable data between them and apply conditional and structural Directives to create multi-step business processes that can be executed and managed as a single unit

These things can be entirely accomplished in a graphical, drag-and-drop environment by business analysts without having to write program code.

A Simple Example

Consider this fairly typical scenario illustrated in the diagram:

In this scenario, your organization is required to periodically retrieve orders in an agreed XML format from your trading partner using file transfer protocol (FTP). More than one order document may be retrieved. Your application must process each order document to transform it from the XML format to your in-house received orders database.

Such a scenario might be very easily implemented in LANSA Composer in three steps:

1. Create an FTP configuration that specifies the addressing details and security credentials necessary to communicate with the trading partner via FTP.
2. Create a Transformation Map that specifies how to map from the orders in XML format to the internal database.
3. Create a Processing Sequence that combines the supplied FTP_INBOUND Activity with a loop that executes the Transformation Map for each received order document.

In LANSA Composer, the finished Processing Sequence for this simple scenario might look like this:

This Processing Sequence may then be invoked from your own applications or scheduled to run periodically through your job scheduler of choice as described in Run a Processing Sequence.

Extend the Example Scenario

You can take and extend this scenario in many ways and still accomplish the result using LANSA Composer:

• Add custom business processing to validate and accept the incoming orders

• Generate acknowledgment documents in an agreed XML format and FTP them to the trading partner

• Implement similar processes for other types of business information such as inventory and price inquiries, purchasing, invoicing, and more

• Use other transport protocols such as HTTP, IBM MQ Series or e-mail or implement different FTP configurations for different trading partners

• Design business processes that perform such processing repetitively for a range of trading partners