Customizing Dovetail Carrier – Making A Plan
Dovetail Carrier facilitates the creation of an enterprise message bus where messages can be produced and more importantly consumed. We have included a framework for creating sets of rules that act as consumers of messages coming into the system.
I will be doing a series of posts around creating custom extensions for Carrier. The goal of these posts is to educate you and to force me to shine a light on the Carrier customization story in order find the rough edges begging to be smoothed out. Here is what we are going to cover.
- Making A Plan (you are here)
- Creating and Publishing Messages
- Consuming messages with RuleSets
Whatever Shall We Do?
To make all this a little more bearable. Let’s set the stage by creating a goal to shoot for while learning how to customize Carrier. This will all be more fun if we actually make something. The most straight forward thing I can think to create is a Twitter version of our EmailAgent product. Let’s get “creative” and call it TwitterAgent.
The idea is to pull direct messages from Twitter and use them to create cases or log notes to existing cases as Tweets come in. To create a Twitter version of our EmailAgent application 2 RuleSets will be put into play:
- Tweets that are direct messages to an account will create cases.
- Tweets that include case identifiers will log notes to the case.
Lets see the create case rule set in action.
Carrier is going to pick up this Tweet and publish it to Carrier’s message bus. A message consumer will pick up the Tweet and use it to create a case.
Next up we will create a Twitter listening service that pulls direct messages off Twitter and publishes them into our service bus.
