With IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation 23.0.1, you can now natively trigger your workflow automations by submitting Kafka message events. Workflow Designer allows you to easily enable your workflow automation for message-event driven interactions.
To expose a message-event based interface, you create a Kafka service. Kafka services can be implemented by processes or service flows. Each Kafka service comes with its AsyncAPI definition that describes the details your Kafka client needs. You trigger your workflow automations by using Kafka message events in an asynchronous, loosely coupled fashion.
The following example illustrates a Loan Approval workflow automation with a Loan Approval process. To allow this Loan Approval process to be started by a Kafka message event, create a Kafka Service.
In the Kafka Service editor, add a submit operation and select the Loan Approval process as the operation’s implementation.
Create a new version of your Loan Approval workflow automation.
In the Kafka client of your choice, you use the information the AsyncAPI definition provides, such as the Kafka server URL, topic, and message event schemas.
Now, you can send a Kafka message event to your Loan Approval automation.
For more information about how to enable loosely coupled, message event-driven interactions between clients and workflow automations see the Creating a Kafka service section in the IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation 23.0.1 documentation.