TS/MP Pathsend and Server Programming Manual (H06.05+, J06.03+)

2 Designing Your Application
To develop a functioning Pathway application, you must identify the individual transactions in your
business operations, design and build the application database, and design and code requester
programs and server programs. This section describes the design of transactions and databases
for Pathway applications and the design of requester and server programs.
To explain these application design tasks, this section uses as an example an application that
processes sales orders for a distributorship. The example shows how the Pathway environment can
be used to create an OLTP application that supports the distributorship’s order-processing operations.
The distributorship in the example has three offices linked by telecommunications:
• \CORP is a network node at corporate headquarters where the purchasing, accounts
receivable, and accounts payable functions are managed.
• \WHS is a network node in a warehouse where the inventory, shipping, and receiving functions
are performed.
• \REG is a network node in a sales office that is responsible for processing all customer orders
in a particular geographic region. Order-processing functions consist of entering orders as
input and maintaining records of each order. To perform these two functions, the order
processing group:
◦ Checks with inventory control to determine if items to be ordered are in stock
◦ Sends inventory control shipping and ordered-items information about each order
◦ Gets customer credit information from accounts receivable
◦ Sends billing information to accounts receivable
◦ Answers customer inquiries about order status
◦ Records complete information about each order in the database
Designing Transactions
The first step in developing a Pathway application is to identify and define the transactions that
your application will process. To do this, you isolate the business tasks you plan to automate,
analyze the flow of information within those tasks, list the transactions that result from the analysis,
and then identify the various components of the transactions. After these tasks are performed, you
protect each transaction, and therefore the integrity and consistency of the database, with the TMF
subsystem.
Analyzing Data Flow
Analyzing the flow of data involves identifying what information is required for a business task,
determining the order in which that information is required, and specifying how the information is
to be handled. To automate the order-processing tasks of the previously described distributorship,
for example, you could analyze the flow of information as follows:
1. Accept the customer’s identification number, a requested delivery date for the order, and
shipping instructions such as the delivery address.
2. Check the customer’s identification number to ensure that the customer is defined in the \REG
database; get the customer’s name and address from the \REG database; and get a new
order identification from the \REG database.
3. Accept a list of order items along with the requested quantity for each order item.
4. Check the current quantity available, in the database on \WHS, of each ordered item to
ensure that sufficient quantity exists to fill the order.
Designing Transactions 29