Types of business objects

There are two types of business objects: application-specific and generic. Application-specific business objects are used in any WebSphere business integration system, regardless of which integration broker is being used. Generic business objects are used only if the integration broker is WebSphere InterChange Server (ICS). When WebSphere Application Server is the integration broker, only application-specific business objects are used. Therefore, all references to business objects throughout this book refer to application-specific business objects. Many of the books in the IBM WebSphere Business Integration (WBI) Server documentation set cover both environments and therefore refer to both types of business objects.

When an application-specific component detects an application event such as an update, it retrieves the appropriate data entity from the application and transforms it into a business object.

Note:
When documentation refers to a business object whose name includes an application name, such as Clarify_Contact or Oracle_Customer, it refers to an application-specific business object. A Clarify_Contact business object, for example, contains the set of information that the Clarify application stores about a contact. In another application, a contact entity might store a somewhat different set of information, store the information in a different order or format, or have a different name.

After an application-specific component has built a business object, it sends the business object to the connector framework. The connector framework calls the data handler to convert the business object to a WebSphere MQ message to be dispatched to the integration broker.

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