Agreements

You define one or more agreements for a B2B trading partner with an intent to send or receive only certain types of business documents to or from that trading partner. An agreement literally means that your company and the external trading partner have formally agreed upon the terms for the exchange of specific business documents.

An agreement has the following purposes:
  • Armed with the knowledge of which documents to expect from a given trading partner, B2B only accepts one of the agreed-upon documents. Any unexpected document type is rejected both while receiving from or sending to that trading partner.
  • Defines the data format for the documents exchanged. For example, for an EDI document, syntax validations and parsing is done based on the B2B document selected in an agreement. Both parties, your company and the external trading partner, must decide in advance on the data format to use for interoperability to work. One of the parties typically shares an implementation guide containing the data format definition and the other party complies with it and creates an equivalent data format definition on their side.
  • Defines behavior for message processing. For example, syntax validations on the data format can be turned on or off in an agreement, among other settings.
  • Defines rules for the routing of documents. For example, when receiving documents, an inbound agreement defines the backend integration to which to route a document, based on its type. While sending documents, an outbound agreement defines which B2B sending integration to hand over a specific document for delivery to a trading partner.
The agreement lifecycle consists of the following actions:
  • Create an agreement: Adds the definition in the design-time only (but unless deployed, the new agreement is not enforced at runtime).
  • Deploy and redeploy an agreement: Makes the agreement visible for runtime processing and is immediately enforced.
  • Undeploy an agreement: Hides the agreement from runtime processing, making it no longer effective, starting immediately.
  • Delete an agreement: Removes it from design time.

The following example shows inbound and outbound agreements defined for a trading partner:


The Inbound Agreements section includes a plus sign to create an inbound agreement and a table with columns for Name, Document, Status, Backend Integration, and Last Updated. The Outbound Agreements section includes a plus sign to create an outbound agreement and a table with columns for Name, Document, Status, Transport, and Last Updated.

See Create Agreements.