Define your first integration message

What you'll be learning:

  • How to define the schema of the integration messages that carry the data across an integration solution

When you set up an integration solution to exchange data between the Mobilengine Cloud and an external IT system, the best place to start is the definition and management of the XML messages that will carry the data around in the solution. The practical reason is that once the you, the Mobilengine solution developer, and your client's system engineer agree on the schema of the messages that either end of the integration channel needs to handle, you can both work on either end of the integration channel independently of each other.

What you're actually doing when defining an integration message is creating an abstract description of the data that you'd like to exchange with the given message type. Integration messages are known as dacs-es in the Mobilengine universe ('data case', if you need a mnemonic), and you define their schemas in dacsem-extension files.

.dacsem files provide a template for your dacses and also define how the XML structure of the integration messages is represented in the workflow script syntax. Workflow scripts and integration messages work hand in glove: you'll need a dedicated workflow script to process incoming dacses, and you'll see how you can rely on workflow scripts to build and send dacses in an outbound integration solution.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet - you haven't even got an integration message schema yet.