xUML Services Reference Guide
The xUML Services Reference Guide is a comprehensive guide for building reusable xUML services with the Scheer PAS Bridge®, in support of Advanced SOA initiatives that combine Business Process Management (BPM), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Event Driven Architecture (EDA) concepts.
Model Driven Integration (MDI) is a groundbreaking approach to integrate, migrate, and consolidate heterogeneous distributed software systems. It raises the level of abstraction from non-transparent, mostly undocumented code to unambiguous executable models, which serve simultaneously as documentation and production runtime. With MDI, executable models in form of UML®, BPMN® and ARIS EPC are used as the exclusive source to build complex business application and integration scenarios.
By reading this document, you will learn how to create xUML services, which integrate lower level backend access functions to communicate with existing backend applications and services. The xUML Runtime infrastructure houses the various interface bridging adapters for synchronous and asynchronous application connectivity. Out-of-the-box, the Bridge supports a broad selection of public and proprietary interface standards, covering access to databases, systems, message protocols, and platform-specific connectivity, including Java EE and the proprietary t/RFC protocols from SAP.
The notion of a service is used in the SOA request/response pattern: a service is a function that is well defined, self-contained, and does not depend on the state of other services. However, most frequently it depends on interfaces of other services.
Nowadays, the term service is often used synonymously with Web service. Although Web services are an important service type, by reading this document you will learn not only how to model Web services but also other kinds of services such as SAP RFC services or timer services used for EDA patterns.
Topic Overview
Section /wiki/spaces/BRIDGE/pages/19268461 introduces the basic Bridge concepts and the general workflow of building Bridge-compliant and executable UML models.
Section /wiki/spaces/BRIDGE/pages/19268716 explains structural modeling elements like classes, relationships, and attributes.
Section /wiki/spaces/BRIDGE/pages/19268686 describes how the behavior of classes and operations can be defined by using activity diagrams.
Section /wiki/spaces/BRIDGE/pages/19268768 references all operations, macros, and functions provided by the xUML Action Language, which implements parts of the Action Semantics UML Extensions.
Section /wiki/spaces/BRIDGE/pages/19269066 addresses advanced topics like the concept and implementation of persistent states and the security concepts that can be realized with the Bridge using interceptors and proxies. Other topics describe how to use xUML Libraries for well-defined interfaces to encapsulated functionality of your service, monitoring capabilities, and the object-oriented concept of polymorphism.
Section /wiki/spaces/BRIDGE/pages/19267714 lists all adapters. An adapter is a component having a special behavior, like for example a file adapter that can be used to read files from within a Bridge service. For each component, we describe how class-, activity-, and component diagrams are used. Furthermore, we show for each adapter how to define the deployment diagram. Each adapter introduces its own profile that is a set of stereotypes and tagged values used to specify adapter properties. This profile is also described for each adapter.
Section /wiki/spaces/BRIDGE/pages/19268084 lists all xUML services. An xUML service is a service having a special behavior. The SAP service for example can be used to design a Bridge service that acts like a SAP system. For each service, we describe how class-, activity-, and component diagrams are used. Furthermore, we show for each service how to define the deployment diagram. Each xUML service introduces its own profile that is a set of stereotypes and tagged values used to specify service properties. This profile is also described for each xUML service.
Section /wiki/spaces/BRIDGE/pages/19268142 explains by which concepts and tools the Bridge supports testing and debugging.
Section /wiki/spaces/BRIDGE/pages/19268092 contains import rules. The point of using UML for integration modeling is to unify the view on software artifacts. This includes also a unification of various data models as class structures. This chapter shows how different data models are mapped to UML classes by xUML Importer modules. For example, the Bridge maps WSDL definitions, XML Schemas, or SAP IDoc grammars to UML class models. The semantic differences between these models and UML classes are handled by stereotypes and tagged values.
Section /wiki/spaces/BRIDGE/pages/19268168 contains a list of all Bridge error codes, the Profile used in the Builder, regular expressions, char set definitions, database-specific notes, database-specific mappings, and ABAP types mappings (for SAP RFC).
Preconditions
An understanding of object-oriented concepts is useful. Basic knowledge of UML and usage of a UML tool (e.g. MagicDraw™) will simplify the learning process.
Conventions Used in this Reference Guide
The syntax of operations and statements of the xUML Action Language is described using the following Backus Naur Form (BNF) style conventions:
{x}denotes zero or more occurrences ofx.x | ymeans one of eitherxory.
The following typographical conventions for explaining syntax are used in the reference guide:
| Action Language statements are always formatted using a monospaced font. |
| Substitutable information, which represents a name, a value, an expression, etc. and needs to be provided by you, is always formatted using the monospaced font in italic style - example:
In this example, a name for
|
Example References
Several Scheer PAS sample UML models are provided with the Bridge installer. You can unpack them to a folder of your choice as described in /wiki/spaces/INSTALLATION/pages/18612320.
If provided for a discussed topic, you will find example references as shown below at the beginning of a chapter.
In the example reference below, the array sort example is part of the Builder project xUML Action Language. Open this Builder project and choose the UML model arrayConcat.xml.
Example File (Builder project E2E Action Language/Array):
 | <your example path>\E2E Action Language\Array\uml\arrayConcat.xml |
The <your example path> is the path where you installed the examples to. Default path is C:\xUML Documentation.
Clicking the download icon in the example reference allows you to download the latest version of the example project from the documentation pages.