Appendix E. Using LANSA Composer with LANSA Applications

LANSA Composer is an application that is functionally independent of other LANSA products.  It is not necessary at all that you use or have installed other LANSA products (including LANSA development tools) in order to make use of LANSA Composer.

If, however, you do use LANSA development tools to build your own applications, two factors position LANSA Composer to provide the best possible integration with those LANSA applications:

1.  LANSA Composer is built by LANSA

2.  LANSA Composer is itself built using LANSA development tools

 

Typical integration between LANSA Composer and a LANSA application will take place in the course of executing a LANSA Composer Processing Sequence.

The integration may occur in either or both of two directions:

LANSA Application Initiates a Processing Sequence

Processing Sequence Invokes Functions or Components of a LANSA Application

 

There are several standard means that LANSA Composer supports for a LANSA application to integrate with and extend your business process integration solutions.  These include:

• The CALL_FUNCTION activity
  
  LANSA Composer supplies the ready-to-use CALL_FUNCTION activity for calling existing LANSA functions.  The LANSA functions to be called may exist in the same or a different LANSA system and/or partition as LANSA Composer.

• Activity processors for custom activities
  
  In fact, the processors for custom activities that you define must be developed using Visual LANSA, even if they simply exist to call existing 3GL programs.  (Your LANSA Composer supplier can usually do this for you if LANSA development tools and/or LANSA development skills are not available to you.)

• User-defined event notification handlers
  
  As an alternative to the built-in email and SMS event notification handlers, it is possible to define your own event notification handler as a LANSA function.

• LANSA applications can initiate LANSA Composer Processing Sequences
  
  There are several ways to initiate a Processing Sequence, most of which can be used by any application.  However, from LANSA V12SP1, specific built-in functions are provided with LANSA specifically for use by LANSA applications to initiate LANSA Composer Processing Sequence.

Also refer to:

Required Characteristics of the Common LANSA environment

LANSA application developers should be guided in all cases by the relevant LANSA documentation.