AIC Products - Agent Page

The Agent has been designed to eliminate any application programming to link two disparate applications. The Agent provides a flexible method for constructing interfaces between these applications. The Agent has integrated the industry's best translator, DataStage TX (formerly known as Mercator), for reformatting data. The embedding of DataStage TX into the Agent allows for the usage of DataStage TX many ways.

The Agent and its supporting environment provide a consistent method of implementation regardless of application linking uniqueness providing easy long term maintenance and operations. The Agent has also been designed to maximally distribute all processing, with no central bottleneck.

The Agent operates as a state machine for manipulating objects. As a state machine, at startup the Agent reads it's configuration file, initializes the states, and begins processing. The object being processed is a message, and each event processes the message from getting the message to sending the message. This method provides a flexible method to create the interface from standard parts.

Platforms The Agent is also portable and fully supports the following operating systems and hardware platforms.

	HP-UX - HP 9000 PA-RISC
	Microsoft Windows NT Server/Workstation - Intel
	Microsoft Windows 2000 - Intel
	Microsoft Windows XP - Intel
	Other platforms available upon request

Agent Environment

A common development and execution environment is implemented on each platform. Common user programs and system variables hide platform differences from the user.

The Agent provides a consistent and user-friendly logging structure, which can provide different levels of information:

	Error only
	State information, and errors
	State information, data buffers, and errors
	State information, entire message content, debugging information, and errors

Log files are automatically created at midnight and the previous day's log file is moved into a daily directory.

	Message Formats and Acknowledgments
	Application Links
	Processing States

Each of these items can be different based on the source and destination applications requirements.

Message formats are configured for the Agent, such as HL7, EDI, XML, or custom formats. This enables the Agent to perform message validation as data is received. The configurable message validation items are:

	Message Type/ID (i.e. HL7 - ADT/A01; EDI - QG/878)
	Message sequence number, usage, checkpoint, and rollover
	Message data length
	Message checksum
	Severity of Message sequence number validation failures
	Database key and record

Application Links

	TCP/IP, server or client
	RS-232 (Asynchronous)
	STC Datagate™
	AIC Agent Message Routing (AMR)
	FTP
	Shared Files
	SMTP
	IBM SNA LU 6.2
	User Defined Links - Allows the creation of unique communication method, while maintaining the consistency of the Agent environment.
	Microsoft Message Queue™ (MSMQ)
	BEA Tuxedo™
	Oracle8 Advanced Queuing™ (Oracle AQ)
	IBM MQSeries™
	BEA MessageQ™
	Database (ODBC™, Oracle™, Microsoft SQL Server™)

The processing states are used to inform the Agent what, where and when to perform a task. The following list represents the most widely used states:

	Get a message/response
	Send a message/response
	Parse a messages/response
	Build a message/response
	Read, Insert, Update database tables
	Increment sequence number
	Checkpoint sequence number
	Execute user defined system scripts
	User defined action (UDA) routines allow a user to write their own routine for a particular state, and link it into the Agent