What are the differences between Enterprise and Trading Partners

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  1. In TN console, we can see Enterprise and Trading Partners, what are the differences? who should be the Enterprise, who should be the Partners?

  2. In Trading Partners, we can set ‘Delivery Method’ for each partner. In the Processing Rule, if the criteria is based on ‘Document Type’, does it mean that the ‘Delivery Method’ in partner profile will be useless in this case?

  3. In ‘Processing Rule Details’ > ‘Action’ > ‘Deliver Document By’ > ‘Immediate Delivery’ >‘Primary E-mail’, where to set the E-mail?

Thanks a lot for your precious time!

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Yul,

I will strongly recommend reading the Trading Networks Concept Guide and Trading Networks Users Guide to get a complete understanding of webMethods TN and how it works. The questions that you asked have more to them than can be explained in a post here. Here’s an attempt to briefly answers your questions:

  1. Enterprise means your organization and Trading Partners are your the partners that you do business with. Let’s assume your organization ‘ABC’, sells desktop pcs. The companies/customers that purchase the desktops from your org. will be the Trading Partners and the ABC Organization will be Enterprise.

  2. The Document Type and Delivery Methods have different purposes (and that’s why they are both present). A Document Type (usually along with Sender and Receiver) determines which Processing Rule will be selected. EG, lets say now one of your customer’s sends you a Purchase Order (without going into details, lets assume that PO is an XML document following some standard). An appropriate processing rule will be selected in TN based on the document type, ie PO. The processing rule may invoke an IS service that processes the PO. On the other hand if you receive some kind of forecast document (again an XML for simplicity), the document type will be different and a different Processing Rule may be selected, which in turn may invoke another IS service that deals with Forecast data. There are various steps required before an incoming document/xml may be properly recognized and dealt in TN, you will need to read up about that.

Delivery Method for a trading partner (TP), on the other hand determines how you will respond to that TP. Lets say your system is configured to respond to the PO with a Receipt Acknowledgment to the TP. The delivery method determines which protocol to use, what’s the url, user id, password etc.

  1. The email is set in the Delivery Method. You will have to define Primary Email/Secondary Email as the Delivery Method of the TP or Enterprise and then provide Email Id there.

HTH, Rohit

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Rohit, Thanks a lot for your answer and precious time!

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No Problem!