Windchill ESI supports the publishing of data to distribution targets belonging to multiple ERP instances. By generating one Windchill ESI response message per ERP instance, the published data is routed by the EAI software components to the relevant distribution targets.

Windchill ESI services places response messages on multiple TIBCO EMS queues. Each response message caters to an ERP instance. As well, multiple EAR applications deployed in TIBCO middleware use these messages for publishing data to the relevant distribution targets. Therefore, each application subscribes to a unique EMS queue, and is configured to connect to one ERP instance. The following diagram provides an overview of the desired objective:

As indicated in the above diagram, the name of a given EMS queue is composed of two parts. The first part is determined by the value of the Windchill ESI preference named Data Response Queue Name. The second part is determined by the specifics of the ERP instance the queue provides for. For example, in Oracle Applications, when publishing to an Oracle Applications instance, this would consist of the DSN (Data Source Name) associated with the given instance. The queue name takes the following form:

<Value of the preference>.<DSN>

The specifics of the ERP instance viz., the DSN in this case, is obtained from the relevant distribution target attribute stored with the ESITarget object in Windchill. Also obtained from the distribution target is the attribute named Task Uniform Resource Identifier, which holds the name of the I*E task that Windchill ESI services invoke for placing a response message on the relevant EMS queue. Out of the box, this attribute has the value "com/ptc/windchill/esi/export/ ExportToJMSQueue.xml", which is a path relative to the <Windchill>/tasks folder.

The MICU allows you to deploy out of the box EAR applications for multiple ERP instances. Each deployment contains a process archive service consisting of business logic executed by the BW engine, and a couple of ADB 6.3 Adapter archive services one of which contains a publication service that publishes log messages to the process archive, while the other has subscription services for various object types and is responsible for establishing a connection to Oracle Applications. The process archive for a deployment subscribes to an EMS queue whose name is based on the TIBCO global variable ESIJMS/DataResponseQueue. This global variable is populated by the MICU using the value for the relevant field entered by the user in the Oracle Mfg. ERP Properties window.

The process archive service is closely tied to the adapter archive service. For example, with reference to the architecture diagram, the process archive service of a given deployed application (for example Oracle_Apps-1) is able to communicate only with the adapter archive service of the same application. This is achieved by using a unique subject name that is passed by the process engine to the adapter. The subject name has the following form:

ESIOMAdapter/Datasource is a mandatory element in the name and is used by the adapter for creating a connection with the Oracle Applications database using ODBC.

For example, an adapter service configured for creating a part in the ERP system using the deployed application "Oracle_Apps-1" may use the following subject name:

ESIPTCDomain.Oracle_Apps-1.PTC_BL_PROD.Item

The above listed example uses "ESIPTCDomain" for the TIBCO Administrator domain name, "Oracle_Apps-1" for the deployment name, "PTC_BL_PROD" for the global variable ESIOMAdapter/Datasource, and "Item" for the ERP API Service Name.

Each deployed application requires the following ERP connection parameters: