Required files for integration programmers

Depending on what kind of integrations you require, there are special files you must use. Examples are libraries to compile your Java code against, to import into a project, or to use in other ways.

The following list shows several types of integration files that you use in integrations with PolicyCenter and examples of what those files represent.

Web services: Files that you can use with SOAP API client code.
Plugin interfaces: Plugin interfaces for your code to respond to requests from PolicyCenter to calculate a value or perform a task.
Java API libraries: Entity types are defined in the data model for PolicyCenter. These definitions have built-in properties and can also have data model extension properties. For example, Policy and Address are PolicyCenter entities. To access entity data and methods from Java, you need to use Java API libraries.

In all cases, PolicyCenter entities such as Policy contain data properties that can be manipulated either directly or from some contexts by using getters and setters (get... and set... methods).

Depending on the type of integration point, there might be additional methods available on the objects. These additional domain methods often provide valuable functionality.

Entity access	Description	Entities	Necessary libraries
Gosu plugin implementation	Plugin interface defined in Gosu.	Full entity instances	None
Java plugin implementation, including optional OSGi support	Java code that accesses an entity associated with a plugin interface parameter or return value.	Full entity instances	Java API libraries
Java class called from Gosu	Java code called from Gosu that accesses an entity passed as a parameter from Gosu, or a return result to be passed back to Gosu.	Full entity instances	Java API libraries
Web services	WS-I web services	No support for entity types as arguments or return values. Use data transfer objects (DTOs) instead.	n/a

For web services, the DTOs that you use can be any of the following:

Gosu class instances that contain only the properties required for the integration point. You need to declare the class final and add the annotation gw.xml.ws.annotation.WsiExportable.
XML objects with their structure defined in XSD files.
XML objects with their structure defined with the GX modeler. The GX modeler is a tool to generate an XML model with only the desired subset of properties for each entity for each integration point.