Teamcenter SOA Guide

Integrating product design and development managed by Teamcenter into your core business processes Companies are realizing that using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) as the technology foundation for their digital product design and development environment allows them to perform their business activities more flexibly and with less IT interference. SOA services in Teamcenter® software provide an open, rising course that eventually interfaces to the Business Logic Server in the Teamcenter system. This system enables you to acquire access to Teamcenter-driven capabilities and incorporate them into your existing processes – as well as build customized, task-specific programmes to drive business growth.

The most complex challenge for today’s corporate IT groups is to improve real-time visibility into their business activities. IT leadership is particularly concerned with monitoring and controlling the cost of software applications. According to research, the vast majority of IT executives and other senior managers believe that service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the best technology solution for boosting IT agility and minimising the part of the IT budget (40%) related to application integration. Companies are increasingly learning that by implementing SOA as the technological foundation for major computer environments, their businesses become more agile and their processes become more flexible (such as the product design and development environment). Importantly, SOAs enable these gains with less IT effort than was previously possible.

To meet these growing IT demands, Siemens PLM Software has created an SOA framework for Teamcenter, the company’s flagship software for simplifying product lifecycle management (PLM) and supporting the PLM-driven business processes that its customers have embraced.

Teamcenter is the most extensively used PLM solution in the industry, with an integrated suite of tools that improve company efficiency by leveraging technologies such as 3D visualization, community engagement, supplier administration, as well as product and process data management.

Teamcenter’s SOA services offer a new coarse-grained interface to Teamcenter’s Business Logic Server. Teamcenter’s SOA services represent Siemens PLM Software’s long-term vision for allowing client and external applications to access a Teamcenter-managed environment. These services can be used to:

Integrate Teamcenter features into your existing business processes, as well as for developing new, task-specific client programmes.
Integrate existing clients, portals, and executive dashboards with Teamcenter-managed information and status reports. •Integrate the Teamcenter portfolio and application solutions with various external functionality, such as CAD systems, collaborative design management tools (such as Teamcenter’s community collaboration capabilities), manufacturing planning solutions (such as Tecnomatix® software), and popular business applications (such as Microsoft Office). As a result, you can create a single unified environment capable of supporting all of your digital lifecycle management objectives.

Teamcenter’s SOA is based on Web Services industry norms, primarily WS-1 and other WS-x guidelines and procedures. SOA operations are also available via a range of language-specific modules, making it easy for developers fluent in C, C++, C#, and Java to incorporate Performance as measured into new and innovative programs. What does a service-oriented architecture do?

Teamcenter’s SOA services provide new tools for developing high-performance, accessible WAN and firewall-friendly applications in a Teamcenter architecture. Teamcenter services are now available to a broader development community since they comply with industry standards and established best practices.

As a result, more accessibility enhances the chance of more full and comprehensive services evolving at a faster rate. Similarly, the global development community will be able to access and exploit these services without the need to learn a proprietary language or protocol; no extra training is necessary.

What do Teamcenter’s SOA services allow you to do?

The SOA in Teamcenter is a coarse-grained API that exposes Teamcenter’s Application Logic Server functionality to Web Services and dialect apps. This is an excellent solution for allowing a wide range of apps to access product design and development information in your Teamcenter environment.

Teamcenter serves as the engine and repository that integrates all of your environment’s design and product development information in a flexible and loosely coupled manner – while offering your entire global environment a single point of access to these connected assets.

Despite the fact that Teamcenter’s SOA operations are exposed as WS-1 compliant WSDL1 and language-specific interfaces, project teams can use the interface that best serves them while guaranteeing that the Teamcenter procedures are termed the same – and their consequences are the same – in the different languages. Taking advantage of Teamcenter’s SOA capabilities

Organizations that utilise Teamcenter’s SOA benefit from the benefits that come with using a uniform, comprehensive set of interfaces that leverage Teamcenter’s sophisticated product design and development capabilities. The business logic and results received from Teamcenter’s SOA will be the same regardless of what language you use to call these services (and this is fully up to you).

You no longer need to be concerned about the skill sets of your project teams or any language-related dependencies. Teamcenter’s SOA provides a unified set of entry points for all clients and apps – regardless of heritage. When additional technologies are exposed via Teamcenter’s SOA, they are instantly available in all major programming languages and via industry-standard WSDL.

What is Service-Oriented Architecture?

A service-oriented architecture is a system design paradigm that stresses, among other things, the following characteristics:

Effective functional complexity for the activity at hand
Segregation of interface formulation and application
Support for the notion of different practitioners and service consumers • Benchmarks adherence

Service-oriented architectures also have a distinct:

Software framework
Policy set
Best and acceptable practice

All of these ideas and qualities are embodied in Teamcenter’s SOA. It is based on a framework that includes the whole client and service infrastructure, which contributes to consistent, dependable, and high-performance interaction between the application and the server.

This framework allows application developers to focus on designing specialized business functions rather than worrying about the low-level communications and data management operations that occur beneath them. The SOA features of Teamcenter are influenced by two more factors:

Communication using conventional protocols
Formats for message content

Teamcenter’s SOA, like most service-oriented architecture implementations, makes use of conventional HTTP/S.

Teamcenter SOA Framework Components

Protocols for sending XML documents back and forth between the service provider and the service consumer. The usage of these standards helps to the openness, flexibility, and scalability required for both local and global Teamcenter deployments. This open, standards-based messaging environment enables service providers and service consumers to be implemented in different technologies while maintaining compatibility.

This messaging environment also enables existing applications in one technology to be readily converted to interface with newer and richer technologies and programming languages, allowing your firm to protect its investments in existing programmes and processes.

As a result of this adaptability, you can incrementally improve your product design and development environment at a rate that almost matches the real-world evolution of your business. This alignment is greatly aided by the arms-length, loosely connected relationship that exists between service providers (such as Teamcenter’s Business Logic Server) and service consumers (For example, Teamcenter clients, CAD programs, Microsoft Office, and dashboard apps).

A Technical look at Teamcenter’s SOA

Teamcenter’s SOA is made up of the following client-side and server elements that follow well-defined principles and use benchmark protocols, interfaces, and datatypes.

The SOA Framework provides communications and infrastructure functions, allowing application developers to focus on providing business solutions rather than core communication systems challenges.
SOA Language Bindings are language-specific functions (.NET, C++, and Java) that service consumers utilise to execute an SOA service and manage the resulting answer.
The SOA Customer Data Model (CDM) and Data Model Manager allow regulated form retention on the application’s consumer side for all sorts the data by Teamcenter’s Business Logic Cloud hosting solutions.
SOA Toolkit contains tools that enable Teamcenter developers to automatically generate all of the artefacts required for providing new Teamcenter business rules as an SOA service.

In addition to these critical components, Teamcenter’s SOA area involves reference for each of the translation bindings, WSDL, and various XML Schema Definitions (XSDs) used across the system.

Teamcenter’s SOA’s major components capability function

SOA Framework Comprises client-side libraries, as well as communications infrastructure and key capabilities for a best-practice portfolio management solution server-side libraries that comprise a full-featured request/response pipeline. The SOA Toolkit generates all SOA Framework components instantly, and they are practically invisible to both the client and the service provider user.

SOA Language

SOA Language Bindings SOA Standard Agreements provide the client-side elements expected to undertake a user’s service call. Because the SOA Toolkit develops these components, they are functionally comparable across all supported languages. Siemens PLM Software initially includes bindings for C++,.NET and Java.

Teamcenter’s Data Model Manager

Teamcenter’s Client Data Model (CDM)

Each SOA customer call inserts and changes objects supplied by Teamcenter’s Application Logic Server into the client information store. When an existing object is returned, its properties are modified in the data store rather than creating a new/identical item.

The Data Model Manager is also in charge of managing the type and class data meta-model.It can optionally fire events on item creation, deletion, or modification. Client programmes can register listeners for these events and respond accordingly.

Teamcenter’s SOA offers two forms of CDM for client application use, generated from Teamcenter’s Data Model and officially defined within Teamcenter’s Business Modeler/IDE.

The generic model is made up of basic items and their characteristics. Utility functions are given to detect an object’s Teamcenter type, query the type hierarchy, and access the properties of each object.

The type-safe model extends the generic model by including strongly-typed accessors for all objects and their properties. The class hierarchy of this model corresponds to Teamcenter’s Business Logic data model, which is explicitly specified in Teamcenter’s Business Modeler/IDE. Each property’s accessors return the language-specific counterpart of the native.

Teamcenter property type

Using Teamcenter’s SOA services logical deployment architecture organizations commonly implement the Teamcenter environment utilising a four-tier logical architecture that includes:

Client application
Web application server
Enterprise Tier
Resource Tier

Teamcenter SOA Runtime Deployment

Client software Several client applications, such as those developed by Siemens PLM Software and its users, are written in a language other than WSDL. As a result, they often include one of Teamcenter’s SOA client libraries in addition to the CDM. Client libraries or CDM are typically not used in custom integrations established using the WSDL technique. Since both types of clients are HTTP/S-based, they can smoothly and rapidly access Teamcenter via low or high delay connectivity – as well as safely transverse business networks without the need to open extra software ports in those gateways.

Server for web applications Web application servers is used in Teamcenter deployments to provide SOA service endpoints to all client types. Teamcenter modules operating on the sector server-side such as Microsoft IIS and servers based on Java and J2EE technology support both REST-style (regular HTTP POST) and SOAP-style requests. The SOA System features running on these database servers are responsible for unifying the demand into a unified standardized way, which is then passed directly onto Teamcenter’s Business Logic Server, which is hosted in the Enterprise.

Teamcenter Services Functional Areas

As part of Teamcenter’s Business Logic Server, all of the actual SOA services are written in C++. The Resource Tier is home to the Teamcenter database and bulk-data file repositories. The Resource Tier contains no SOA components. Teamcenter’s SOA services are divided into six functional categories.

Software support
Programs
Implementation
Systems management
System definition

Each of these functional areas is subdivided further into one or more libraries, which include the actual services and operations accessible by Teamcenter’s Business Object Server. The accompanying figure depicts the organisation of the six functional areas, as well as the representative library and service names that pertain to major sections. Services are offered for essential needs (such as session and file management), supporting capabilities (such as queries and reporting), and specialised services, as seen in the diagram (such as PLM system definition and administration). Siemens PLM Software will deliver additional libraries and services for each of these categories over time, with a focus on application and application support.

Invoking Teamcenter’s SOA service

Before delving into how Teamcenter’s SOA services are used, it’s a good idea to grasp some of the core concepts that underlie Teamcenter’s SOA service design.

To begin, Teamcenter’s SOA supports sequence services, which implies that nearly all solutions accept multi-input objects on which the Logic can act in a single request. It is desirable to be able to submit or react with more than one item at a time on both the incoming and outbound sides of a request/response cycle. This adaptability is especially crucial when using high-latency wide-area network connections to invoke services.

Teamcenter’s Service Oriented Architecture 11

Adopting a set-based default design for all services promotes loose coupling and infrequent communications. Simultaneously, it minimises the total size of the service set by removing the need for both single item and multi-item interfaces for the same function. A set-based operation may simply manage a set of ones without the need for an additional interface.

Second, Teamcenter’s SOA services are coarse-grained, which means they perform operations that are generally complete in and of themselves from the perspective of a developer or end-user. The service consumer makes a request, and Teamcenter’s Business Logic Server fulfils that request. There are SOA services available in Teamcenter that lessen the occasional network clutter that impacts many typical client/server applications.

Siemens PLM Software developed Teamcenter’s SOA services so that the response to a user operation (such as highlighting a group of items or clicking the “delete” button) occurs in a single request/response cycle. An operation like this could take hundreds of request/response cycles in other architectures and system designs to individually submit and acknowledge the deletion of each highlighted or selected object.

Siemens PLM Software built Teamcenter’s SOA services to respond to a user operation (for example, highlighting a set of objects or clicking the “delete” button) in a single request/response cycle. Other architectural and system designs may need hundreds of request/response cycles to submit and acknowledge the deletion of each highlighted or selected object.

Teamcenter’s SOA client-side libraries

When using Teamcenter’s SOA client-side libraries, developers follow the same processes regardless of whether language binding is used in the application.

Connection: The client programme initially requests a connection object, which contains the parameters that can be used to connect to the server. The SOA client framework creates the connection object and returns it to the application, where it can be used to launch suitable services.

Authentication Service: Invocation must be preceded by an authentication request because Teamcenter is a secure environment. When authentication is successful, a token is returned that is utilized on all service requests made over the established connection. All Teamcenter authentication types, including single sign-on (SSO) and synchronized LDAP, are supported by Teamcenter’s SOA.

Before invoking a service, the client application must construct the relevant input structures as well as set parameters on each item being input as part of the set-based call. Once all of the data has been appropriately organized, it is delivered to a service stub for submission to the Business Logic Server.

Over-the-wire The service stub, in collaboration with the SOA Framework, marshals the service request into a REST XML document and transmits it to the Web Tier through HTTP/S.

The request is routed by the Web Tier SOA Framework to an available/assigned instance of the Business Logic Server. The request is routed by the Enterprise Tier SOA Framework to the proper services skeleton, where the XML content is unmarshalled. The service endpoint or implementation is then called, and the business logic of the service is executed. The service skeleton marshals the results to a REST XML file and provides it to the Web Tier once the business logic has been completed.

The service answer is received by the Web Tier SOA Framework and correctly formatted for an HTTP/S POST response.

Client structure The service stub unmarshals the response, processes it through the SOA Framework into the Client Data Model (including any error information), and returns control to the client application.

Using Teamcenter’s SOA from WSDL-based applications

You can utilise the same set of processes mentioned above (in the “Using Teamcenter’s SOA client-side libraries” discussion) to invoke an SOA service from a WSDL-based web services application with just a few changes to the components. These changes include the following variations.

To begin, WSDL-based apps do not often make use of the Teamcenter client-side libraries. Instead, they employ utility methods in each of the major web services toolkits to automatically generate the required connection objects and input/output structures for service directly from the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). As one might anticipate, technologies like Microsoft’s Visual Studio can substantially assist the developer by scanning the WSDL for service and transparently generating the necessary artefacts.

The only other distinction between the REST and SOAP pathways is the point of entry into the Web Tier. Unlike the previously stated REST entry points, the SOAP request is handled by the SOAP engine on the Web Tier. The SOAP engine parses the SOAP XML file and transmits it to the Online Services endpoint generated by Teamcenter’s SOA Kit.

The request is marshaled to a REST XML document at the service endpoint and forwarded to Teamcenter’s Business Logic Server in the same manner as stated in the REST example earlier. The Business Logic Server is never informed whether the request came from a SOAP endpoint or a REST endpoint. This technique ensures that service innovations are always handled the same way, regardless of the sort of client who makes the request.

In terms of the service response, the Web Service endpoint returns control to the SOAP engine, where it is prepared properly for a SOAP-over-HTTP response.

After receiving the response, tools in the online services toolkit (the toolkit used to build the client application) unmarshal it into forms that the client programme may immediately use. Because the Client Data Model and the Data Manager Model are built into the SOA Framework, no further processing is required to handle the business objects returned in the response.

Supported Configurations

As mentioned throughout this white paper, Teamcenter’s SOA services are fully supported on all normal four-tier Teamcenter deployments. Furthermore, Teamcenter’s SOA services are supported in Teamcenter’s “two-tier” setup, which is occasionally utilized by Teamcenter customers migrating up from Teamcenter Engineering.

Two-tier installations combine the Teamcenter client and a Business Logic Server instance on each end user’s PC; the shared database and file stores remain on a centralized resource layer. This setup often employs CORBA/IIOP communications rather than HTTP/S and does not include the Teamcenter Web Tier. As a result, client implementations in this sort of deployment must use one of the provided languages binds rather than a WSDL-based client implementation.

Conclusion

Companies may enable additional business capabilities, decrease IT complexity, and speed IT deployment by implementing an efficient SOA in their PLM operations – as well as re-use more applications (through web services) and better link their PLM endeavours with other business activities.

Teamcenter’s SOA services enable powerful, flexible, and scalability access to your electronic design process, as well as the accompanying knowledge sources. The SOA’s safe, WAN-friendly, and firewall-friendly characteristics make it ideal for satisfying the most stringent demands of both large and small businesses.

Technically, Teamcenter’s SOA is a cutting-edge version built on – and compliant with – the most recent quality standards for online services compatibility. By using Teamcenter as the foundation of your digital enterprise, you can immediately reap the benefits of web services technology through an infrastructure that facilitates a lower cost of ownership and significantly increased interaction between your business systems and the technological systems that support your product and process design projects ,

Siemens PLM Software first focused on Teamcenter’s SOA on the robust features and high efficiency required to create a core architecture and service-based design able to support both large and small installations. The services provided by Teamcenter’s SOA encompass a wide spectrum of Teamcenter capabilities, with a focus on easing your design and prototyping processes.

Future Teamcenter SOA updates will add value to an organization by uncovering supplemental Workflow functions, supporting more language connections, invoking supplemental tiers in the Teamcenter stack, and fostering interoperability with other perspectives offerings as these programmes converge toward industry norms.

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