Configuring when Smart Communications for PolicyCenter creates documents

Smart Communications for PolicyCenter enables you to specify when PolicyCenter creates, or binds, documents from SmartCOMM templates. The integration defines three values that you can specify in the DocumentProductionBindingType parameter in config.xml. From earliest to latest binding, the parameter values are:
  • EARLY – With early binding, creating, modifying, or other actions on a document causes document production to generate the document contents.
  • EARLY_DEFERRED – Early deferred binding occurs a bit later in the process than early binding. With early deferred, document production generates the document contents after establishing communication with the SmartCOMM messaging infrastructure.
  • LATE – With late binding, Bulk Submission Job batch processing generates the document contents.

The base configuration is configured for early binding. Through configuration, you can implement early deferred and late binding.

Early and early deferred binding

In early binding, the event fired rule for document production starts document production by generating the XML payload.

Creating, modifying, canceling, or other actions on a document fires an event. The Event Fired > Document Production > Async Document Creation rule handles these events. If early binding is configured, this rule creates a message for the SmartCommsDocumentMessageTransport plugin. The plugin builds a transaction file from the XML payload and writes it to the location shared with the SmartCOMM Appliance.

The differences between early and early deferred are the contents of the message and when the XML payload is generated. In early deferred binding, the SmartCommsDocumentMessageTransport plugin starts document production by generating the XML payload.

The following diagram shows the flow when creating a document using the early and early deferred binding.


Late binding

In late binding, Bulk Submission Job batch processing starts document production by generating the XML payload.


Plugins

The binding flows use the following plugins for document creation. The early and early deferred flows create documents synchronously and asynchronously. The late binding flow only creates documents asynchronously.

Implementation Interface Description
SmartCommsDocumentMessageTransport MessageTransport

InitializablePlugin

 This plugin implementation processes asynchronous document creation messages and writes transaction files into the input folder for the SmartCOMM Appliance. Responds to the GenerateDocument event.

The plugin passes the report template identifier to SmartCOMM Appliance in the XML transaction data. The template identifier is the TemplateId element of the document template descriptor in PolicyCenter. The template identifier must exactly match the SmartCOMM report template resource identifier.
SmartCommsDocumentProduction plugin IDocumentProduction This plugin implementation creates documents using SmartCOMM templates.