Services

To get a 360-degree view of a customer, you must gather information for that customer from several different systems. One of those systems could be Pega Platform™. For example, if an insurance claim application is implemented on Pega Platform, you may need to expose a service that returns the claims for a specific customer. In this example, an external system requests data from your application. Pega uses services to facilitate this integration.

Services allow you to expose the data and functionality of your application to external systems. Services implement the interface of a specific protocol and provide data mapping for outbound and inbound content. You can parse, convert, and map data in either direction to or from the clipboard. Data can be in XML, fixed record structure, or separated by a delimiter character format.

The service listener listens for incoming requests. Service listeners provide Pega Platform with information the platform needs to route incoming messages to a specific service. The service listener establishes a requestor. A requestor is the processing and data associated with the incoming request initiated by the external system. The underlying Web or Application Server sometimes provide this functionality, and sometimes a Pega listener provides this functionality.

Review the procedure for processing a request from an external system:

1. The service listener instantiates the protocol-specific service to provide communication with Pega and establish a requestor. The service listener optionally performs authentication.
2. The service parses the incoming request and maps the request onto the clipboard. The service then invokes the service activity. The service activity provides the logic for the service.
3. When your service activity is complete, control is returned to the service. The service builds the response using data on the clipboard, and the service listener sends the response to the external system.

Pega provides services for a wide range of industry-standard protocols and standards, including SOAP, REST, EJB, JMS, MQ, and File.