Communities

A community is a Axway Activator object that represents your local way of grouping trading partners. It defines your organization’s internal processes for handling messages. It also defines how your community expects to receive messages from back-end applications and from remote partner exchange points.

This information is used by your system to set document back-up options, tune system performance and communicate with back-end systems.

Additionally, when you add one or more messaging IDs to a community, the community can be assigned the role of a sender or receiver in an agreement.

The trading information in the community configuration is important to your partners. It consists of what message protocols and transports you want partners to use when sending documents to you. If you want to securely exchange documents, the exported community definition also contains a copy of your certificate and public key used by partners to encrypt messages before sending.

When you add a community in the Axway Activator user interface, you specify the following elements:

Community name
Routing ID to be used by partners to send you documents. A community can have multiple routing IDs.
For secure trading, a certificate with a public-private key pair. Your private key remains in your system. Only the public key and certificate are provided to partners in the exported community profile.

After you add a community, you can view and manage the community configuration in the user interface.

The Activator user interface view of the community includes a graphic image of the community's component elements.

In the user interface, you can click the elements of the community graphic to view and manage each part of the community configuration.

Summary – A report of trading activity for the period you specify, defaulting to activity within the last hour. It also shows the default delivery exchange for receiving messages from partners and certificate information.
Properties – Displays the name and country code of the community, as well as any associated attributes.
Certificates – Displays certificates associated with a community. On this page you can add and manage certificates. For more information see Certificates pages.
Routing IDs – Displays the routing IDs associated with a community. A community routing ID is the “from” address used in message trading. A community must have at least one, but can have multiple routing IDs. For more information see Routing IDs.
Contacts – Displays the principal contact person for the community and the corresponding email address. You can optionally add a phone number and notes.
You can use any email address you want. This can be an address for one person or an alias address with a distribution to many people. You also can enter multiple e-mail addresses by separating each address with a semicolon.
Messaging IDs – Enables you to view, add and manage messaging IDs for the community. Messaging IDs are optional additions to a community. Each messaging ID enables the community to be selected as the sender or receiver of a specific message standard in an agreement.
Agreements – Enables you to view the Agreements page. This page shows a list of agreements and enables you to search for any agreements in which the community may be a sender or receiver participant.
[Transport] users – The [Transport] users page lists user accounts associated with embedded servers and the usage for the users. [Transport] is a variable for transports such as FTP, SFTP and others.
The [Transport] users icon appears only when certain types of embedded servers have been configured for a community.
Application delivery – Displays the transports set up to route messages to a back-end system. A community can have multiple application delivery exchanges. For more information, see Application deliveries.
Application pickup – Displays the transports set up to retrieve messages from back-end systems for packaging and sending to partners or other applications. If a community has multiple application pickup exchanges, all are polled for outbound messages. For more information see Application pickups.
Delivery settings – Enables you to set the default delivery exchange for the community to use for routing consumed messages. For more information, see Application delivery settings.
Message validation – The message validation page lets you set whether a community accepts or rejects EDI messages with duplicate control IDs. You also can specify whether a community accepts or rejects signed or encrypted messages. For more information see Inbound message validation rules.
Trading pickup – The trading pickup page shows the message protocols and transports partners use to send messages to the community and how the community retrieves the sent messages. A community with multiple trading pickups gives partners multiple avenues for sending messages. For more information see Community trading pickups and partner deliveries.
HTTP proxy – Use the HTTP proxy page to define a global HTTP proxy through which all outbound HTTP traffic is routed, if needed. All communities use this proxy. For more information see HTTP outbound proxy.
Trading partners – The trading partners page shows the partners that belong to a community. For more information see Community trading partners.