Unification
The unification infrastructure is a set of services that exposes business objects and the relations between them in back-end applications. It enables the portal to interpret, illustrate, and present the relations in the business objects, which represent data in a back-end system.
Using a set of design tools, content developers can create Drag&Relate enabled iViews and facilitate object-based navigation (OBN) for business objects. Drag&Relate, which is based on the relation resolving features in unification is both a navigation method as well as the technology for sending queries and receiving results in the form of a URL.
From the same application or different applications in a back-end system, the content developer can collect data into an iView that is enabled to carry out Drag&Relate processes using the SAP proprietary Hyperrelational Navigation Protocol (HRNP).
The Drag&Relate functionality for an iView is stored as part of the iView’s meta-data in the PCD. At runtime, an end user can drag an item from the Drag&Relate enabled iView, and drop it on to another Drag&Relate enabled iView to obtain information about the relations, and the related data between the business object and the target iView.
Unification in the Portal
Unification in the portal consists of portal services that implement interfaces for use both at runtime and at design time to enable business object modeling, structuring of relations for business objects, and Drag&Relate capabilities in the portal.
The set of portal services and components responsible for unification include tools, such as, the query iView wizard, which is used for creating query-based iViews.
In addition, you can create applications, such as iViews that use the unification services to communicate with back-end systems through unifiers. You can customize the generic behavior of the applications that you create to the requirements of different back-end systems.
The services and interfaces responsible for unification in the portal include:
· Drag&Relate Service
Implements and manages default Drag&Relate processes at runtime. In addition, it provides the main interface for Drag&Relate methods.
Content developers can modify the default implementation of the DragAndRelate processes.
· Relation Resolving Service
Receives two business objects and finds the relation between them. First, it attempts to find manual relations, and then automatic relations.
In addition, it uses the Autocomplete service to determine the lightest path between two business objects. Relationship between objects can be based on relations from the back-end application, or autocomplete relations defined by the content developer.
¡ Autocomplete Service
Finds the lightest path between two business objects within a set of relationships.
· Unification Controller Service
Drives and coordinates the relations resolving processes and the operations.
It has an interface to the Distributed Query Engine (DQE), which communicates with the JDBC driver to dispatch distributed queries (from multiple data sources), and provide results to the target iViews.
In addition, the service interfaces with the Relation Resolving (RRS), and Autocomplete services, which work with the actual metadata obtained from back-end systems, and the manually defined relations.
· Business ObjectSemantic Layer
Provides an infrastructure that communicates with the PCD and DQE, and exposes unification objects to the unification services, such as editing, and caching business objects, and their relations.
From the PCD, the DQE, and the back-end enterprise systems, the business object semantic layer enables interfaces that extract business objects, attributes of unification objects, and information about relations created and defined at design time.
· Unification Design Time Tools
Responsible for running the set of tools used at design time to define meta-data such as, relations and business objects for an iView: including iView wizards, relationship editors, and unification elements in the portal administration environment.
The following figure shows some of the services that facilitate unification in the portal.
