Trading partners are an optional feature of LANSA Composer. You can create, maintain, and delete trading partner definitions according to your application's needs.
Trading partners are particularly useful for organizing files into directories (typically for inbound and outbound transport), for sharing common Activities and Processing Sequences with different source and target locations by using variable inputs associated with the trading partner and for performing iterative processing.
They may be registered and transport Configurations and Transformation Maps linked to the trading partner. A directory structure may be used where each trading partner has a group of directories used for different types of files. This gives a structure to the data that makes for easier and better management of the multitude of files.
In addition, application-specific properties of a trading partner may be globally defined and values for those properties entered for each trading partner. This makes the trading partner functionality extensible to accommodate custom requirements.
The trading partner information may be referenced at run-time (in a Processing Sequence) in two ways:
For more information on dynamically accessing trading partner variables in your processing sequence, refer to Using the Trading Partner Built-in Variables.
The trading partner features may not be necessary or applicable in all cases.
To work with trading partners, expand Definitions in the Navigator and click Trading partners. To find out how to locate and select trading partners to work with, refer to:
Locating and selecting items in the Instance Lists
For information on common tasks associated with trading partners (such as creating, copying, deleting and printing definitions) refer to:
For information on tasks associated specifically with trading partners, refer to the following:
Trading Partner Data Interchange Attributes
Link Directories to a Trading Partner
Link Transformation Maps to a Trading Partner
Link Configurations to a Trading Partner