Agents are software components that act on behalf of users or other agents to gather or process information in the background. Typically, an agent is given a small, well-defined task.
Enterprise Portal agents allow you to schedule or externally trigger automatic processing of a portlet’s content. You can also create agent rules that evaluate a portlet’s content based on specified criteria. If a portlet’s content matches the criteria, certain actions take place, such as writing the portlet’s content to e-mail message, to a database, or to disk, which is accomplished using an adapter. If the portlet’s content does not match the criteria, a transaction message is written to a log.
Figure 12-1: Agents process flow
Agents are executed by:
A timer triggering the agent’s execution based on the agent’s schedule
One agent triggering another agent’s execution
Selecting the Run option to execute any agent once
When an agent runs, the system checks the agent’s rules—if there are any—to determine if the agent should continue running. If the criteria specified in the rules has been met, the agent’s actions execute.
To write a portlet’s content to a file, an e-mail message, or a database table, you create an adapter. When the agent is triggered, the adapter interface writes the associated portlet’s content to a specified destination.
You can also assign an agent to a specific agent server to run that agent. Although you can create new agent servers, a default agent server is installed with Enterprise Portal. If an agent is unassigned and there is more than one agent server, the first available agent server runs the agent. If only the default agent server exists, all agents run on that server.
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