This chapter shows how to use the CICS event specification to create an event application in IBM Operational Decision Manager to detect event patterns.

This chapter includes the following topics:

IBM Operational Decision Manager can receive CICS events and perform event pattern detection. IBM Operational Decision Manager includes the following components:

For more information about Operational Decision Manager, see this website:

In the Stock quote scenario, when a stock quote is requested by a customer, a CICS event is emitted. By using this kind of event, you can use the Decision Server component of Operational Decision Manager to identify a pattern; for example, where a customer submits four stock quotes within two hours. This pattern can show the customer has potential interest to purchase the stock, but has not yet made up their mind to proceed. The business can then take a proactive action to encourage the purchase, such as sending a discount offer to the customer through email.

To add to the business use case, a more complex pattern can be identified by using the Decision Server. For example, if the customer made four stock quotes but did not order the stock after one day, a discount offer might be sent to the customer. For more information about this scenario, see Figure 4-4 on page 73.

Section 9.2, “Building an event project in Event Designer” describes the steps to build the event application in the Event Designer component of Decision Server using the event specification exported from CICS Explorer.

Section 9.3, “Next steps” on page 200 provides a pointer to a Redbooks publication for further steps for using Operational Decision Manager to deploy the event application and look at the events and actions.

This section explains how to use the Event Designer to build the event application. The Event Designer is a Decision Server Events component that is based on Eclipse and supports the definition of the metadata layer that is required for business event processing. Use the Event Designer to create all the building blocks for your event application, including events, business objects, actions, and event rules.

For more information about the artifacts that can be created in an event project, review the event projects topic in the Operational Decision Manager Information Center, which is available at this website:

Complete the following steps to create the event project in the Event Designer:

In the new event project, you create the event objects that represent the stock query event structure. You can create business objects from the event objects that carry information from the event received to the action that is fired by the Decision Server.

You can create the event objects manually or import an XML representation of the business event and create the business objects from this. Because you already have the XML representation of the CICS event, which is the .xsd file that is exported from event specification as shown in 6.3.1, “Exporting the event specification” on page 121, QueryStock.xsd, you can use this file to import to Event Designer and create the event objects. This file also can be found in Appendix B, “Additional material” on page 243.

Because the Decision Server uses HTTP connector to receive the events, you must make sure that the EP adapter that is used for the Stock Quote event binding is the HTTP EP adapter, and that the event format is WebSphere Business Events (WBE) when you export the event specification.

Complete the following steps to define the event object and the business object:

The action that starts when the event pattern is identified now can be created from the business object. Complete the following steps to create an action:

Complete the following steps to create the action objects:

You can now author the event rules to identify event patterns and perform the actions. It is a good practice to start with a simple rule and test it, then build a more complex rule on that rule.

A simple rule is shown in Figure 9-3 on page 198. On top of this simple rule, you can add a filter to filter out the customers who already ordered a stock based on the Order event, so that a discount offer does not need to be sent to these customers.

For more information about building more complex rules, see the topic Getting started with event rules in the IBM Operational Decision Manager Information Center, which is available at this website:

The final authoring stage for the event application is to configure the event technology connectors (connectors) for the Decision Server Events run time to receive the event.

This scenario uses the HTTP event connector to receive the events from CICS.

The Query Event is received from CICS by using the HTTP connector. Complete the following steps to configure the event connector:

At this point, the QUERY-STOCK project should look like Figure 9-5 on page 200, which has an event object, business object, action, action object, and an event rule.

To simplify testing of the scenario, you do not configure a connector for the FollowUp action. Instead, the Events tooling is used to verify that the action fired when the business rule is met.

In an actual scenario, an appropriate connector is used to send the generated action to the required system. For example, the FollowUp action can deliver an email to customer.

You can now deploy the event application to the Decision Server Events run time on z/OS and then run the shopping sample and create some queries on the stocks. To verify that the CICS events are received by the Decision Server, you can log in to the events administrative console and look at the reports of events and actions.

For more information, see Making Better Decisions Using IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management, REDP4836-00, which is available at this website:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4836.html