PolicyCenter export to Canvas

Guidewire can establish an automated process to export your organization's policy data periodically from PolicyCenter to Canvas. If that process is in place, Canvas displays policy premiums and total insured value alongside Canvas graphics.

To prepare to run this periodic process for the first time, your organization manually submits the Canvas Historical Record batch job. That job creates an initial set of database records that hold policy data for the lines of business supported by Canvas. The job likely will take hours.

After the Canvas Historical Record batch job completes, your organization submits a job manually to write the new database records to a single extract file on AWS S3, for automatic upload by Canvas. We'll hereafter refer to that second software process as the Canvas Outbound File job.

After the two initial tasks are complete, the Canvas Outbound File job runs periodically and quickly, without human intervention. The purpose is to move subsequent PolicyCenter transaction data to an extract file for automatic upload to Canvas.

Important: Work with Guidewire Support to ensure that your Canvas installation is ready to do the automatic upload.

The description that follows assumes that you've downloaded the following content and expanded it on your machine, as is possible only for Guidewire customers: PolicyCenter (PC) integration zip file.

Historical batch jobs

The Canvas Historical Record batch job acts on data for every policy that was ever in force.

After your organization manually invokes that job, a Guidewire work-queue runs a query to identify policy data that reflects the PolicyPeriod entities of interest. These PolicyPeriod entities become work items on a queue, and worker threads process them in parallel. The historical batch job inserts pre-formatted, tab-delimited Canvas string records into the OutboundRecord table in the PolicyCenter database.

You run the Canvas Historical Record batch job manually from the PolicyCenter Batch Info page; and when the job completes, your organization submits the Canvas Outbound File job from the same location.

For further details on submission and monitoring, see Submit the historical PolicyCenter batch jobs.

Ongoing data upload and transfer

In various situations, policy records are created that are of interest to Canvas users. Cases include automated renewal and an agent's binding a policy.

When a pre-update handler in PolicyCenter detects the creation of a PolicyPeriod record, the handler invokes a process that writes one row per policy location into the OutboundRecord table. That write happens only in relation to the Canvas-supported lines of business that apply to the PolicyPeriod entity.

To define the schedule for the automated run of the Canvas Outbound File job, your organization customizes a file that is equivalent to the following one in your download: Misc. configuration files\scheduler-config.xml.

Implementation details

Important: During record creation, the Canvas Historical Record batch job uses a transaction bundle to operate on each PolicyPeriod work item. The bundle runs under the context of a PolicyCenter user.
To run the historical batch work queue successfully for a given PolicyCenter user, test a canvas.user entry locally and then define it in Guidewire Cloud Platform (GWCP) Secrets Manager:
  • As used for local development, the following sample-credentials file contains an example entry: Misc. configuration files\credentials.xml. Here's the entry: 
    <tns:CredentialsElem key="canvas.user">     
   <username>canvasbatchuser</username> 
   <password>NOTREQUIRED</password> 
</tns:CredentialsElem>
  • At Guidewire Cloud Platform, the process is as follows:
    1. Move to the left and click Security > Secrets. The Secrets dialog is displayed.
    2. Specify the planet (for example, dev) and set the application as PolicyCenter.
    3. Specify the key (in this example, canvas.user) and set the following value: the username and password, separated by a colon(:). The value in this example is canvasbatuser:NOTREQUIRED.

      Although the overall canvas.user entry is needed and the value starts with the user name and colon, the password itself is not in use for the integration implementation as delivered and can be any value.

    4. Click + Add Secret.

The Canvas integration implementation uses the out-of-the-box Guidewire Outbound File Integration framework. For details of the outbound file configuration, see the following PolicyCenter file: Misc. configuration files\OutboundFileConfiguration.xml.

The following naming convention is in effect:
  • For the cloud development environment:
    • File prefix: canvas
    • File name: GWLiveCanvasOutbound
    • File extension: tsv

    Here's an example full name: canvas-GWLiveCanvasOutbound-202404031511-65.tsv

  • For the local development environment:
    • File prefix: canvas
    • File name: GWLiveCanvasOutboundLocal
    • File extension: tsv

    Here's an example full name: canvas-GWLiveCanvasOutboundLocal-202404031511-15.tsv

Although an integration developer does much of the integration work, assigning total insured values likely involves a business analyst's specifying requirements that a configuration developer implements.

For further details, see Downloadable files for the PolicyCenter export.