Communication with external systems

Optionally ProcMan can be configured for exchanging data with external systems. This feature is typically used to connect an external ticket system, which allows associating ProcMan processes with tickets managed by the ticket systems, filling ProcMan process dialog fields with data from tickets and reporting ProcMan process/activity status changes back to the external system. The communication is managed by a ProcMan module called HWM Universal Interface. An important prerequisite is that the external system provides an HTTP/HTTPS server interface. ProcMan can currently be configured only as a client of the communication and does not provide any server service for handling request from external systems.

As any external system provides its own communication protocol (the form of the requests/responses and security requirements), configuration of the communication in ProcMan means to set special options and implementing some callback functions. Thus the configuration of the communication always requires HORIZONT support. To be able to configure it, a precise specification of the protocol provided by the external system is required.

The specification of the protocol shall provide at least answers to following questions:

Is it an encrypted communication, are CA and/or client certificates required and who provides them? Over what URL is the external system accessible? What method shall the request use: GET or POST? What is the structure of a request, what has to be sent in GET/POST parameters, what in http headers, what in http data? Are there some special data required in the request by the external system (e.g. authentication string, special http headers, etc.)? What format (JSON, XML, etc.) and structure (attribute/tag names, data types, etc.) shall the request data have? What format (JSON, XML, etc.) and structure (attribute/tag names, data types, etc.) have the response data? What data are sent in the http response headers and what in the http response data by the external system? Are there special responses in case of errors sent by the external system and what structure they have? Shall also the activity/process status changes be reported by ProcMan to the external system? If yes, what are the answers to the above questions for this kind of communication? Can all open tickets be requested by one request from the external system or only data for one in the request specified ticket?