Atom Specific Connection Settings

Important
This is an advanced feature of Boomi AtomSphere designed for very specific integration scenario. If your requirements do not fit this scenario, you should not use this feature.

You should not use Atom-specific Connection settings instead of defining multiple Connection Components.

This articles assumes the reader is familiar with Connectors, Atoms, and Deploying Processes.

Atom-specific Connection settings can be used when the exact same Process can be deployed to multiple Atoms and only the Connection details change from Atom to Atom. This feature can eliminate the need to create multiple copies of essentially identical Processes and then have maintain all those Processes as business and technical requirements change.

This situation is often seen in "hub and spoke" scenarios, where the same data must flow between the hub and each of the spokes. Each spoke must have the same Connection type (application or data source) and only the physical connection details (e.g. IP address or directory name) differ for each spoke.

Configuration

Before configuring the Connection, all the Atoms the Process will be deployed to (and that you need to configure specific settings for) must already be deployed.

Create a new Connection (or edit an existing one) and configure it as you normally would.
Click the Preferences icon ( ) on the right side. This displays the list of all Atoms deployed in your account.
Check the Atoms you wish to define specific configurations for and click OK. A dropdown box now appears with the list of Atoms you selected.
For each Atom in the list modify the settings required for that Atom.
When finished, click Save & Close.

You can define specific settings for some or all of the Atoms the Process will be deployed to. When the Process executes on a given Atom it will only use the Connection settings configured for that specific Atom. If the Process executes on an Atom that doesn't have a specific setting, the Default connection settings will be used.

Note: Although the Database Connection is featured in the scenario below, Atom-specific settings are available for all Connector types.

Scenario

Suppose corporate headquarters wants to aggregate daily sales information from the Point-of-Sale (POS) applications installed at each of its stores around the country. The integration process needs to extract today's sales transactions from a database located in each store and create a CSV (comma separated value) file to send to the corporate FTP server.

To accommodate this situation, an Atom would be deployed to a machine within each store because it has to access the database running behind the store's individual network. The Boomi Process would be exactly the same for each store: same database query (Database Profile), same CSV format (Flat File Profile), same mapping and validation logic, and same FTP server and directory to put the files. Even the source database type, user name, password, and schema names are the same. The only thing that changes from store to store is the IP Address (or host name) of the database server for each instance of the POS application. So to avoid having to make a copy of the Process for each store and then maintain all those copies whenever business requirements change, you can create the Process once and specify multiple sets of configurations within the same Connection Component.

To do this, create a new Connection Component and configure it as you normally would, then click the Preferences icon ( ) on the right side. This displays the list of all Atoms deployed in your account.

Check the Atoms you wish to define specific configurations for and click OK. In the example, there are three Atoms we need to configure. A dropdown box now appears with the list of Atoms you selected.

Go through the list of Atoms and for each one, modify the settings required for that Atom. In the example, the only value that changes is the IP Address.

After configuring the Connection for each Atom, click Save & Close. When you have finished building the rest of the Process, deploy it to each Atom. Now when the Process executes on a given Atom it will only use the Connection settings configured for that specific Atom.