Co-authored by Claudia Zentner and Khirallah Birkler

With IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation 25.0.0 and the containerized workflow in IBM Business Automation Workflow 25.0.0.0, you can now natively trigger your workflow automations by sending IBM MQ messages. 

By using message driven interactions, you can decouple your systems and get reliability, fault tolerance and consistency. Using IBM MQ adds additional quality of service because the messages are processed in a transactional way. Combining transactional messaging with transactional service flows ensures data integrity and prevents message loss or duplication when invoking workflow automations from external systems.

Configure IBM MQ for use by workflow automations

IBM MQ needs to be provisioned externally. To enable workflow automations, you need to set up an IBM MQ instance and create an input queue. Detailed instructions for configuring IBM MQ and creating the necessary queues can be found in the IBM documentation.

Creating a MQ service in Workflow Designer

To expose an IBM MQ message-based interface, you create an MQ service. MQ services can be implemented using either processes or service flows depending on your automation needs. 

Each MQ service is accompanied by an AsyncAPI 3.0 definition that provides all the necessary details your MQ client requires to interact with the service. This enables asynchronous, transactional, and loosely coupled communication between systems. 

The following example showcases a Loan Approval workflow automation that includes a Loan Approval process. To enable this process to be triggered by an MQ message, you define an MQ Service that listens for the appropriate event and initiates the workflow accordingly.

In the MQ Service editor, add a submit operation, and select the Loan Approval process as the implementation for that operation. 

Create a new version of your Loan Approval workflow automation.

Then, using the MQ client of your choice, refer to the details provided in the AsyncAPI definition—including the MQ Queue Manager endpoint, queue name, and message schemas—to configure the client and send messages accordingly.

Triggering IBM MQ services from an external client

You can now trigger your Loan Approval automation by sending an IBM MQ message event. To do this, use an MQ client —for example, the IBM MQ JMS Client sample.

For detailed guidance on enabling loosely coupled, message-driven interactions between clients and workflow automations, refer to the IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation documentation or the IBM Business Automation Workflow documentation.