Chapter 5 Building a Collaborative Business Process Model

Introducing ebXML CPA

In addition to ebXML BPSS1.04 support, PowerDesigner generates optionally an ebXML Collaboration Protocol Agreement (CPA) template. You perform the generation using the ebXML BPSS 1.04 process language.

An ebXML Collaboration Protocol Profile defines a business partner's technical capabilities to engage in electronic business collaborations with other partners by exchanging electronic messages. An ebXML CPA documents the technical agreement between two (or more) partners to engage in electronic business collaboration. The CPA can be seen as an intersection of the collaborative partners CPP (Collaborative Partner Profile).

ebXML CPA is an XML format for describing agreement information for partners that agree to collaborate. This agreement is based on the ebXML architecture.

The Collaborative Partner Agreement captures critical information for communications between applications and business processes and also records specific technical parameters for conducting electronic business.

Information agreed by the two parties includes BPSS documents, choreography (Requests, Responses, ordering), and parameters for exchanging messages: transport (protocol, security, addresses), document exchange (protocol, security), and message packaging.

A CPA document can be produced in the following ways:

Based on the same BPSS document instance, two partners negotiate technical and/or functional details of their collaboration and draw up the result in the form of a CPA
Based on the CPP of each partner, two partners try to match their technical capabilities at the various levels of the collaboration protocol and put the matching results in the CPA document
One trading partner registers a CPA template document based on the BPSS document and the technical parameters he can support. In this "almost complete" CPA, some items must be completed or negotiated. Other items (such as endpoint address) should be provided by another party

Since PowerDesigner allows you to generate BPSS documents, it also provides the functionality to generate a CPA template. The generated CPA document cannot be directly registered; you must open it in a text editor and modify manually the parts that are in commentary.

For more information on how to design ebXML CPA concepts and produce a CPA document in PowerDesigner, see sections Designing for ebXML CPA and Generating for ebXML CPA.