Background

SOA Suite for Healthcare Integration pack comes with a pre-installed simulator that can be used as an external endpoint to generate inbound and outbound HL7 traffic on specified MLLP ports. This is a command-line utility that can be very handy when trying to build a complete end-to-end demo within a standalone, closed environment.

The ant-based utility accepts the name of a configuration file as the command-line input argument. The format of this configuration file has changed between PS4 and PS5. In PS4, the configuration file was XML based and in PS5, it is name-value property based.

The rest of this note highlights these differences and provides samples that can be used to run the first scenario from the product samples set.

PS4 - Configuration File

The sample configuration file for PS4 is shown below.

The configuration file contains information about the following items:

• Directory for incoming and outgoing files for the host running SOA Suite Healthcare
  
• Polling Interval for the directory
  
• External Endpoint Logical Names
• External Endpoint Server Host Name and Ports
• Message throughput to be simulated for generating outbound messages
  
• Documents to be handled by different endpoints

A copy of this file can be downloaded from here.

PS5 - Configuration File

The corresponding sample configuration file for PS5 is shown below.

The configuration file contains similar information about the sample scenario but is not in XML format. It has name-value pairs specified in the form of a properties file. This sample file can be downloaded from here.

Simulator Configuration

Before running the simulator, the environment has to be set by defining the proper ANT_HOME and JAVA_HOME. The following extract is taken from a working sample shell script to set the environment:

Also, as a part of setting the environment, template jndi.properties and logging.properties can be generated by using the following ant command:

• ant -f ant-b2bsimulator-util.xml b2bsimulator-prop

Sample jndi.properties and logging.properties are shown below and can be modified, as needed.

The jndi.properties contains information about connectivity to the local Weblogic Managed Server instance and the logging.properties file controls the amount of logging that can be generated from the running simulator process.

Simulator Usage - Start and Stop

The command syntax to launch the simulator via ant is the same in PS4 and PS5. Only the appropriate configuration file has to be supplied as the command-line argument, for example:

• ant -f ant-b2bsimulator-util.xml b2bsimulatorstart -Dargs="simulator1.hl7-config.xml"

This will start the simulator and will keep running to provide an active external endpoint for SOA Healthcare Integration engine. To stop the simulator, a similar ant command can be used, for example:

• ant -f ant-b2bsimulator-util.xml b2bsimulatorstop