Basic concepts

In this section, we explain the main concepts that an user of YouSolution.Cloud platform must know to use it.

Partner

It is the IT Partner of the final customer. Each company must be associated with a partner to use YouSolution.Cloud platform.

The partner logs in to the YouSolution.Cloud platform as an Admin user and deals with creating and managing synchronization flows of each company associated with it.

The partner is the owner of the users' accounts. The users of a Partner can be associated to each companies of that Partner.

Company

The Partner, as an Admin user, manages one or more companies. For each company it is possible:

• create and manage the synchronization flows.
• visualize all the synchronized and unsynchronized documents.
• visualize the statistics about synchronized messages of all the flows.
• create the company users' accounts.

Users

In the YouSolution.cloud platform, there are four different types of users:

Admin

This is the administrator account used by the Partner.

The Admin user is identified by the icon and it is used to:

• create and manage the flows.
• visualize and manage the synchronized and unsynchronized documents.
• visualize the synchronization status.
• visualize the statistics about the synchronized messages.
• create and manage the users of the company.

Super user

The Super user account is used by the final customer.

The Super user is identified by the icon and gives the possibility to:

• create and manage the flows of the company associated with.
• visualize and manage the synchronized and unsynchronized documents.
• visualize the synchronization status.
• visualize the statistics about the synchronized messages.

User

The User account is used by the final customer.

The user with role User is identified by the icon and it is used to:

• visualize the statistics about the synchronized messages of the flows of his company.

When creating a user, you can set his role choosing from those listed above. Each role involves the possibility of carrying out certain actions.

Support user

In the YouSolution.cloud platform there is also a special user with role Support.

This user is created exclusively by the YouSolution.cloud team and it provides help for an Admin user to become familiar with the platform.

The Support user teaches to an Admin user the basic operations to perform with the platform, in particular how to create and manage the sync plans.

NOTE

The Support user can be added also to companies of different partners.

The Support user is identified by the icon .

Node

The nodes represent the two systems involved in the synchronization process.

• The source node is the node from which the data to be synchronized are taken and sent to the platform.
• The target node is the node to which the synchronized data are sent.

Entity

It is the data to synchronize (ex. Business Partners, Invoices, Orders, etc...).

Sync Plan

It is a synchronization flow between two systems.

A sync plan consists of two nodes called source node and target node, which represent the 2 systems between which data synchronization takes place, and one entity, which represents the type of the exchanged data (ex. Business Partner, Invoices, Orders...).

Delivery strategy: PUSH vs PULL

The delivery strategy defines how the consumer sends messages from the platform to the nodes.

Two different delivery strategies are available in YouSolution.Cloud platform:

• push: the platform automatically sends message to the node as soon as it is available.
• pull: the node has to make a request to the platform to get the message.

Unidirectional and bidirectional flow

A synchronization flow can be unidirectional or bidirectional:

• unidirectional: the data is sent only from the source node to the target node.
• bidirectional: the data can be sent either from the source node to the target node or from the target node to the source node.

Storable and non-storable flow

A synchronization flow can be storable or non-storable:

• storable: is a sync plan whose synchronized data will be stored for a period of time, chosen by the user, or without time limits.
• non-storable: is a sync plan whose synchronized data will be deleted one month after the last update.

NOTE

A synchronization cannot be bidirectional if the flow is non-storable.

One-to-many synchronization

It is possible to create groups of flows that share the same source node and entity, but different target nodes.

Example

SOURCE NODE	TARGET NODE	ENTITY
System A	System B	Person
System A	System C	Person

This type of synchronization is called one-to-many synchronization because a common source node sends a message to more than one target node simultaneously.

The flows that share the same source node and entity belongs to a group.

Project

A sync plan is contained in a project, which can contains one or more related sync plans.

WARNING

Do not confuse the concepts of project and group.

• The group contains only the sync plans with the same source node and entity.
• The project can contain any type of sync plans. It is the user who determines which sync plans to include in a project (typically sync plans that are logically related).

Message vs Document

The Message is the data sent by the producer to the platform. It contains the key fields, the shared fields and it might also contain other information that will not involved in the synchronization.

After the Message has been placed in the queues, the synchronization process extracts the key fields and the shared fields and sends them to the target node.

The Document is the result of the synchronization of the Message. It contains only the key fields and the shared information between the two nodes involved in the synchronization process.

Example

This is an example Message sent by the producer of the source node to the platform.

{
  "id": 1,
  "firstName": "John",
  "lastName": "Smith",
  "age": 32,
  "city": "New York",
  "job": "Accountant",
  "phone": "357900219001"
}

Assuming that id is the key field and firstName, lastName and age are the shared information, the synchronization process extracts these fields from the Message and sends them to the target node.

When the synchronization has been completed, both the source node and the target node will contain the following Document:

{
  "id": 1,
  "firstName": "John",
  "lastName": "Smith",
  "age": 32,
}

We can say that the Message is the data before the synchronization, while the Document is the data at the end of the synchronisation process. (see The data synchronization process)

Queues

Each node has two type of queues called updated and synced:

• The updated queue receives in input the data sent from the node to the platform.
• The synced queue receive in input the data sent from the platform to the node.

Producer and Consumer

The producer writes data to be synchronized from the source node to the YouSolution.Cloud.

The consumer takes data from the platform and send them to the target node.