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MAPFORCE Description |
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Today, the ability to seamlessly exchange information between internal business units, customers, and partners is vital for success; yet most organizations store and exchange information in a variety of dissimilar formats, such as those used by EDI systems, flat files, databases, and XML-based applications. To efficiently leverage existing investments and interconnect business systems, organizations need the ability to map between these different data types and effectively convert their data in a standards-based, cost-effective manner.
Web services and custom data integration applications are two modern solutions that allow organizations to unify these disparate formats to enjoy the cost and competitive advantages of seamless information exchange. MapForce® 2006 uniquely lets you map data in an intuitive, visual manner. Then it auto-generates the program code or stylesheets required to implement your Web services and custom data integration applications server-side.
The MapForce visual design paradigm means that you can create Web services and data integration applications - without having to manually write a single line of code.
Simplify Web Services Development
Web services are software components that allow disparate applications to exchange data using a standard XML-based messaging system. Since they are based on open Web standards and XML-based protocols, Web services are hardware, programming language, and operating system independent. This means that applications written in different programming languages and running on different platforms can seamlessly exchange data using Web services.
Despite the advantages of Web services for exchanging information between disparate systems, writing the code to implement them by hand can be complicated, time consuming, and error-prone. Altova MapForce 2006 removes these drawbacks by allowing you to build Web services visually, then auto-generating the Java or C# code required to implement the Web service on a server.
To build a Web service, you simply load an existing WSDL (Web Services Description Language) file in the MapForce project view, and create a mapping for each transaction. All standard WSDL documents are supported, including those created in the graphical WSDL design view of Altova XMLSpy®.
Once you’ve loaded a WSDL file, you simply define the operations for each transaction included in the Web service as a mapping design. MapForce represents the transaction’s input and output schemas graphically, and you can easily map data and perform operations by dragging connecting lines to link elements and dragging in function blocks from the library. Supported data sources include XML, databases, flat files, and EDI (EDIFACT and ASNI X12) formats, and you can map these in any combination to and from the operations in your WSDL transactions.
An extensible library of data processing functions is available for filtering and processing data before returning it to the output schema, and the MapForce visual function builder helps create and save complex functions for use in other mappings. |
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