Generating business objects

The WebSphere business integration system provides SAPODA to enable you to define business objects and the metadata required to support the processing of those business objects in the SAP application. SAPODA generates business object definitions from tables you specify graphically. This utility is most useful for creating individual business object definitions rather than hierarchical business object definitions. You must manually define the relationships between parent and child business objects.

Generating business objects: SAPODA

SAPODA generates individual business object definitions for the Hierarchical Dynamic Retrieve Module. If you use this utility to create hierarchical business object definitions, you must manually specify the relationships between the generated parent and child business object definitions.

Note:
Table definition anomalies may produce definitions that require manual changes to fully meet your needs.

Steps to creating a business object definition with SAPODA

To use SAPODA to generate a business object definition for this module:

  1. Launch SAPODA.
  2. Launch Business Object Designer, which is the utility that facilitates development of business object definitions, both manually and automatically (by providing access to ODAs).
  3. Follow a six-step process in Business Object Designer to configure and run the ODA.
  4. Use Business Object Designer to manually modify the generated definition:

For information on using SAPODA, see Generating business object definitions using SAPODA. For information on launching Business Object Designer and using it to manually modify a business object definition, see the Business Object Development Guide.

Creating relationships between tables

SAPODA generates a business object definition for every table you specify. When it completes generating, you can open all tables in Business Object Designer for editing.

To create a hierarchical business object definition from the individual business object definitions generated by SAPODA, do the following:

  1. Determine the table at the top of the hierarchy.

    Assume, for example, the top-level business object is SAP_Customer. This business object has a single key, Customer_KUNNR. SAPODA specifies the following application-specific information for this attribute:

    TN=KNA1:CN=KUNNR

  2. Locate and differentiate every child and grandchild business object.
  3. To the top-level business object and to each parent in the hierarchy below it, add an attribute that represents each child business object or array of child business objects:
  4. To each child business object definition that contains an attribute corresponding to the key of its parent, specify the foreign-key relationship in the attribute's application-specific information.

    For example, most business objects that are a direct child of SAP_Customer contain the Customer_KUNNR attribute. In the application-specific information for Customer_KUNNR, specify the following:

        TN=KNVI:CN=KUNNR:FK=..Customer_KUNNR

    For information on specifying foreign keys, see Table 37.

  5. Locate child business object definitions whose corresponding tables do not contain the key of the parent object. In these definitions, locate a non-key field in the parent that matches the child's primary key.

    For example, SAP_Customer_ADRC is a second-level business object with no key the same as its parent's. SAPODA generates this business object definition with the Address_number_ADDRNUMBER attribute, which is a non-key field in SAP_Customer.

    In the application-specific information for this attribute, specify the foreign-key relationship as:

        TN=ADRC:CN=ADDRNUMBER:FK=..Address_ADRNR
    Note:
    Because SAP changed the name of the ADDNR field used in tables (such as KNA1) created in SAP Version 3x to ADDRNUMBER in tables (such as ADRC) created in SAP Version 4x, recognizing the relationship between these two fields is more challenging.

Copyright IBM Corporation 1997, 2004. All Rights Reserved.