Since I started my career, I have been witnessing the process of delivering a design document to the development team, who start with the implementation of the same design. I have never seen an instance where the development team can start with an object that’s been designed in the system technically and can simply implement/extend it on the technical means.
So far we have been familiar with the Message mapping template and Communication Channel Template etc. (or very few templates for that matter). I was really surprised to see the level of details that we can provide in an iFlow template. Let’s check the details.
The usual way of creating an iFlow is
The available Enterprise Integration Patterns based on which we usually create an iFlow are
Consider a case where you have 10+ interfaces based on same design and are complicated too. Hence, you want to design the whole interface end to end on your own and you want the development team to take care of creating the data structures, mapping logic and the channel parameters etc. This is exactly what you can establish using the iFlow templates. Let's see how.
Start creating your own template, name it and save it.
Now, design the interface the way you want it.
Once you are done with the design, you can assign all the design objects based on the type of the interface. But, observe the level of details of the objects that you can assign to your template.
Assigning the Outbound interface
Defining the condition for the recipient list
Assigning an Inbound interface
Assigning a mapping program and also the look-up channels that are used in the mapping program.
Assigning the Communication Channels (Referenced Channels). You can select one channel and choose copy from the context menu and select another receiver and choose paste from the context menu so as to copy most of the values of the first channel to the second one. Except the name of the channel, it copies all the data.
Once you are done with the template, you can ask your development team to create 10 such iFlows for your rest of the 10 interfaces and assign the design objects accordingly.
In fact, you had already developed the interface and just need the data parts to be assigned to it. From now on, we can handover a concrete design object along with the design document to the development team.