Name Reservation 

 

Software development that is globally distributed requires a conflict-free method of creating names for software objects. Without such a method, different development teams could accidentally use the same name for software objects that have different purposes. If the software objects are then merged in the same runtime environment, this could even disable applications due to a “simple” naming conflict.

To avoid naming conflicts, the SAP System Landscape Directory (SLD) provides a name reservation service (also known as the name server) that enables you to “reserve” names that are globally unique. The underlying principle is the namespace concept. (For more information about the namespace concept, see SAP Service Marketplace at service.sap.com/namespaces). A namespace is defined by a namespace prefix, which is the leading part of a development object name. For certain object name categories, a namespace can contain a number of sub-namespaces.

A complete name for a development component consists of the vendor ID followed by a project-specific path and the name of the development component itself. The vendor ID can be the Internet domain of the vendor (sap.com, for example). The complete name would be: <vendor ID>/<project>/[<sub-project>/]<component name>. Example: The vendor Petshop has a Web store project that contains the development components Catalog and Order. The complete names of these development components are: petshop.com/webstore/catalog and petshop.com/webstore/order, which both belong to the namespace petshop.com/webstore/.

Object names must adhere to the following rules:

·        The name corresponds to the syntax of the object name category.

·        The leading parts of a name are exactly the same as the namespace definition (namespace prefix).

·        The closing asterisk in the namespace prefix represents all names that belong to this namespace (testcomp belongs to test*, for example).

If you define new development objects within the SAP Java Development Infrastructure (JDI), the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio provides you with all the namespaces that have already been defined for the relevant object name category. You can then choose an appropriate namespace prefix and complete the naming of your objects. Subsequently, the JDI reserves this name for you on the name server.

The following functions are included on the name reservation interface in the SLD:

·        Define a new namespace prefix

·        Display and copy namespace prefixes for each object name category

·        Reserve single names

·        Maintain namespace prefixes (administration)

These functions are described in the following sections.