Trading parties are the entities which are participating in business-to-business communications. The parties can be either on the host side, for example, an internal department, or a remote trading party, for example, a Vendor. These parties can communicate using channels with the support of standard B2B protocols such as AS1, AS2, EBMS and Plain SOAP. This section captures the information about the entities within the organization as well as the partners.
The two groups that come under Trading Parties are:
- Host Trading Party: An entity within the organization, which needs to communicate with external entities, using their own set of communication channels has to be added as 'Host Trading Party'.
- Remote Trading Party: Any entity outside the organization with which the Host Trading Parties do B2B transactions has to be added as 'Remote Trading Party' or 'Remote Partner'. The Host Trading Parties communicate with Remote Partners using the standard B2B protocols. This information is stored as 'Channel Configuration' which forms part of a trading party configuration.
Configuration
Basic Configuration
In the dashboard, the Trading Parties tab under Navigation Panel provides option to add Trading Parties.
The Basic tab in the Trading Partners page enables configuration of the contact details of a trading party and their additional contacts, as relevant.
The option to uncheck the Is Active check box allows deactivating an already added trading party and all their endpoints. This helps to suspend a remote partner's contract that is awaiting renewal, in such a case.
In the Figure 1, the trading parties created: MyCompany and SalesDepartment created are host trading parties, and Vendor1 and Vendor2 are remote trading parties/partners.
Figure 1: Basic Configuration
Channels Configuration
Channels define the protocols with which the entities communicate with each other. They capture the information that is specific to a protocol, for example, the email addresses (AS1), URLs (AS2) and endpoint addresses. Each trading party can be associated with multiple channels.
Example1:
If SalesDepartment needs to receive documents from Vendor1 which sends business documents using the AS2 protocol, an AS2 channel needs to be added in Sales Department's channels.
Example2:
If Vendor1 receives documents from its partners using AS1 protocol to a particular mail ID, an AS1 channel needs to be added to Vendor1 channels and the mail ID should be specified in the channel's configuration.
Protocol Parameters
Under Channels tab, the top panel (Channels) in Figure 2 shows various channels configured for a Host Trading Party. The Protocol Parameters tab present below this panel enables configuration of EBMS channel properties.
Figure 2: Channels Configuration
The details specific to a protocol like encryption/signing configuration that is required by a channel can be configured in this tab.
In the figure, since the channels correspond to Host Trading Party, the configuration is for receiving messages. Details like port on which the EBMS requests will be received can be configured as part of channel properties. For a Remote Trading Party, information about the endpoint URL can be configured instead.
Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous configuration includes the Retry configuration for actions to be performed in case of failure.