Identify the Interface Structure

• Types of Interface Structure
• Identify the Structure to Use
• Advantages of Simple versus Complex Interface Structure

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Types of Interface Structure [top]

There are two types of interface structure: Simple and Complex.

Simple Interface

Use a single channel to connect one source to one target.

Complex Interface

Use a channel pipeline to connect a single source to multiple targets. This consists of a single “source channel” that reads the from the message source, and then feeds multiple “destination channels” (one for each target).

Identify the Structure to Use [top]

Identifying the type is quite simple, just answer two questions and choose from the structures.

Questions:

1. How many Sources are you messages coming from?
2. How many Targets are your messages going to?

Structures:

Sources	Targets	Interface Type	Channel Structure
1	1	Simple	Single channel
1	Many	Complex	Channel pipeline
Many	1	Multiple simple interfaces	Multiple single channels (one per source)
Many	Many	Multiple complex interfaces	Multiple channel pipelines (one per source)

Advantages of Simple versus Complex Interface Structure [top]

Simple:

• Simplicity

Complex:

• Flexibility
• Copy a single message source to multiple message targets
  Note: You could also use multiple Simple Interfaces, but this would need a multiple duplicate message sources, one for each interface.
• Stop transmitting to all target systems by stopping the Pipeline Source channel
  Note: If you were using multiple Simple Interfaces you would need to stop every interface
• You can continue reading and queueing messages while one or more target interfaces are stopped
  Note: This is not possible with Simple Interfaces, as any stopped interfaces will not be reading messages

The last point is actually a valid reason to consider a Complex Structure for a simple interface.