1.1 What Is LANSA Composer?
LANSA Composer is a design and execution platform for integrating business activities involving transport and transformation of data along with custom business processing. It satisfies these three key requirements of a business process integration (BPI) solution:
Transport
LANSA Composer provides ready-to-use Activities supporting widely-used transport protocols including:
- FTP Inbound (file transfer protocol)
- FTP Outbound (file transfer protocol)
- HTTP Inbound (hypertext transfer protocol)
- HTTP Outbound (hypertext transfer protocol)
- POP3 for inbound e-mail (post office protocol)
- SMTP for outbound e-mail (simple mail transfer protocol)
- Inbound and outbound via message brokering systems such as IBM MQ Series
To use these transport Activities with LANSA Composer, you simply need to provide configurations that specify the variable information required to connect or communicate with the other parties involved. There is no programming involved.
Using the supplied transport Activities, you can exchange business information such as orders and invoices with other parties, including external trading partners and internal business units, using agreed standards-based protocols as appropriate for each party.
Transformation
LANSA Composer includes powerful visual mapping that allows you to define how to map data between disparate formats including:
- XML documents
- EDI documents
- Microsoft Excel 2010 (XLSX) files
- Text files (for example comma-separated values)
- Web service functions
- A wide range of databases, including IBM DB2 Universal Database for IBM i.
The maps created with the visual mapping tool can be directly integrated into your business processes along with transport and other Activities.
With the transformation capabilities you can transform business information between external and internal formats as it is received or before it is sent. In this way you can readily extract information from corporate databases to send as, say, XML conforming to a schema agreed with your trading partner. Similarly you can transform in-coming XML documents and write them directly to your corporate database for further processing by your existing applications.
Process Orchestration
LANSA Composer provides a simple but powerful process orchestration capability that allows you to combine transport, transformation and custom business processing with processing Directives that provide conditional, iterative and other capabilities. A complete business process consisting of a number of steps may be defined, executed and managed as a single processing unit of work, without programming.
Also see
1.1.1 Extensible And Customizable
1.1.2 Who Can Use LANSA Composer?
1.1.3 What Can I Do With LANSA Composer?
1.1.4 Transaction Document Processing with LANSA Composer
1.1.5 How Is LANSA Composer different to LANSA Integrator?