What is HCL Marketing Operations Integration Services?

HCL® Marketing Operations Integration Services combines the Marketing Operations Integration Webservice, SOAP API procedures, and triggers to extend business capabilities.

HCL Marketing Operations Integration Services is a composite of the following.

  • Marketing Operations Integration Webservice

    Integration Services provide a way for Marketing Operations customers and HCL Professional Services to integrate Marketing Operations with other applications that run in their environment.

  • Marketing Operations procedures and SOAP API

    Custom procedures can be defined within Marketing Operations to extend Marketing Operations business logic in arbitrary ways. After you define procedures, these procedures can be the targets for the Integration Services webservice calls from other applications. Procedures also can be defined to send messages to other applications.

  • Marketing Operations triggers

    Triggers can be associated with events and procedures in Marketing Operations. When one such event occurs, the associated trigger is run.

REST APIs do not use Marketing Operations integration services. For information about the REST API, see the HCL Marketing Operations Administrator's Guide.

Versions and backwards-compatibility

Future versions of the integration services will be backwardly compatible with all minor and maintenance releases that share a major version number. However, HCL reserves the right to break compatibility with an earlier version for dot zero (x.0) major releases if the business or technical case warrants.

The major version number of this API is incremented if any of the following changes are made.

  • Data interpretation changes
  • Business logic changes (for example, service method functions changes)
  • Method parameters, return types, or both change

The minor version number of the API is incremented if any of the following changes are made. These changes are compatible with an earlier version by definition.

  • New method added
  • New data type is added and its usage is restricted to a new method
  • New element added to an enumerated type
  • A new version of an interface is defined with a version suffix

Authentication

Authentication is not required; all clients are associated with a known HCL Marketing Operations user named PlanAPIUser. A system administrator configures the security capabilities of this special user to meet the needs of all webservice clients.

Locale

The only locale that is supported is the locale that is currently configured for the HCL Marketing Operations system instance. All locale-dependent data, such as messages and currency, are assumed to be in the system locale.

State management

The API and webservice are stateless; no per-client information is saved by the service implementation across API calls. This feature provides for an efficient service implementation and simplifies cluster support.

Database transactions

Marketing Operations Integration Services does not show database transactions to the client, but uses such information if it is included in the execution context. If a transaction is started, then the effect of all API calls within a particular procedure is atomic. In other words, a failed API call leaves the database in the same state as if the API was never called at all. Other users of Marketing Operations do not see the changes until the procedure successfully completes the transaction.

API calls that update the database must first acquire an edit lock to prevent other users from modifying the underlying data during the API calls. Other users cannot update locked components until the API call completes. Likewise, the next Marketing Operations user or API client must acquire the lock on the data before another API call is submitted.

Event processing

Operations on HCL Marketing Operations components through the API generate the same events as if a Marketing Operations user did the operation. Users that subscribed to certain notifications, such as project state changes, are notified of state changes that result from API calls and user actions.