Developing Connectors

When developing a Connector for TIBCO Scribe®, you must provide functionality to support using the Connector as the desired source or target. You can use the TIBCO Scribe® Connector Development Kit to create the following types of Connectors:

Replication Service (RS)
Integration Service (IS) Or Migration Service (MS)

For IS2 or MS2 Connectors, you can choose to allow your users to connect either with a custom UI or through OAuth authentication.

For a complete listing of the classes, interfaces, and enumerated lists that make up the TIBCO Scribe® Connector API see CDK Reference To TIBCO Scribe® API Namespaces.

Download the SDK - Connector Toolkit project and extract the sample Connectors and unit tests.

Connector Interfaces

The TIBCO Scribe® CDK uses two interfaces:

IMetadataProvider — Provides the metadata details of your entities and fields from the Connector to TIBCO Scribe®.

IConnector — Provides the runtime link between TIBCO Scribe® and the targeted application API or technology.

While both interfaces must be fully implemented, many of the methods can be “stubbed out”, depending on the type of Connector you create.

Connector Roles

The Connector role indicates important information such as:

Which methods are implemented from Scribe.Core.ConnectorApi.
Whether the Connector is accessing the data as a source or a target.
Which TIBCO Scribe® Solution types are supported.

Specify roles in the supported SolutionRoles parameter of ScribeConnectorAttribute.

See Connector Roles in the CDK Key Concepts topic.

Specifying Connector Roles

Add the role name, such as Scribe.RS.Source or Scribe.IS2.Target, to the array of supported solution roles.

After the Connector is recognized by TIBCO Scribe®, the supported solution role is recognized and the ConnectorTypeName that you specified for the Connector displays in the appropriate connection user interfaces.

For example, if the role of a Connector is Scribe.RS.Source, then the ConnectorTypeName only appears for replication services and may only be used as a source Connector.

Connectors can contain multiple roles.

Space for Connector names is limited in the Connector Marketplace icon. The maximum length for ConnectorTypeName is 25 characters. Names wrap only if they contain spaces and ultimately end in ellipsis (...) if they exceed 25 characters, as shown in the following image. The full ConnectorTypeName for the Connector shown below is TIBCO Scribe® Labs - US Postal Service, which does display fully in hover text.

Changing Connector Roles

Once a Connector has been recognized by TIBCO Scribe® and is available from the list of Connectors, you can only change the Connector’s role or roles using one of the following methods:

Setting a new ConnectorTypeID and then recompiling your Connector code.
Recompiling the same Connector and asking operations to change it.

If you need to change roles for your Connector after it has been published and is being used in TIBCO Scribe® Solutions, contact TIBCO for assistance.

Assign the appropriate roles for your Connector before making it available to TIBCO Scribe®.