General Information

Inheritances

In the CDM, inheritances between different entities express specialization. For instance, the Financial Contract and Loan entities are connected by the Financial Contract Category inheritance, indicating that a loan is a specialization of a financial contract.

Each inheritance defines whether the parent entity or the child entity is generated in the PDM. This denormalization of the normalized CDM means that the attributes of the non-generated entity are added in the PDM to the table that represents the generated entity.

Inheritances also contain a specifying attribute. In the PDM, this attribute is added to the table of the generated entity, so that it can be used to specify which specialization is represented by a specific entry in the table.

To indicate that an entry in the Financial Contract table of the PDM represents a loan, enter the value Loan in the Financial Contract Category attribute.

Associations

In the CDM, relationships between two entities can be defined using the following granularities:

1:1 Relationships

In 1:1 relationships in the CDM, you must specify which of the related entities has the dominant role. When relationships are generated to the PDM, the primary keys in the dominant entity are inserted as foreign keys by an association in the CDS entity that represents the non-dominant CDM entity in the PDM.

Example

The Data Protection and Privacy Details of Business Partner relationship connects the Business Partner and Data Protection and Privacy Details entities in the CDM with a 1:1 relationship. The Business Partner entity is defined as having the dominant role. In the PDM, the CDS entity Data Protection and Privacy Detail has, therefore, the ASSOC_BusinessPartner association as the foreign key.

You can also mark this type of relationship in the extended attributes as a denormalized relationship. This means that the attributes of the entity that has the non-dominant role are generated into the PDM CDS entity that represents the dominant role. An example of such a relationship in the CDM is CCP Default Fund Details of Business Partner.
1:n or n:1 Relationships

When these relationships are generated to the PDM, the primary key fields of the entity that represents the granularity n are inserted as foreign primary keys in the PDM CDS entities that represent the granularity 1 by an association.

Example

In the CDM, the Business Partner and the Rating entities are connected by the 1:n relationship Rating of Business Partner. This means that one rating can be assigned to a business partner once, but multiple different ratings can be assigned to the business partner at the same time.
n:m Relationships

When these relationships are generated to the PDM, a new CDS entity is created there, which represents this relationship. This new PDM CDS entity contains the primary key fields of both CDM entities in the form of two associations.

Example

The n:m relationship Business Partner Classification connects the CDM entities Business Partner and Business Partner Class. In the PDM, this is represented by the CDS entity Business Partner Classification, which contains the ASSOC_BusinessPartnerID and ASSOC_ClasificationOfBusinessPartner associations.
Indirect n:m Relationships

In some cases, further attributes are needed for n:m relationships to define them in more detail. These relationships are not modeled with a direct n:m relationship, but by an additional entity that is connected to the related entities through a 1:n relationship.

Example

When you create an n:m relationship between the Business Partner and Financial Contract entities, you need to know which business partner is related to which contract and the role of the business partner (for a loan contract, you would, for example, need to know who is the borrower and who is the lender).

The Business Partner Contract Assignment entity has the 1:n relationship Business Partner of Partner Contract Assignment with the Business Partner entity and the 1:n relationship Contract of Partner Contract Assignment with the Financial Contract entity. In the Business Partner Contract Assignment entity, attributes such as Role or Contract Data Owner are assigned, thus defining the original n:m relationship required between the business partner and the financial contract.

For more information about adding new relationships to the data model, see More Information at the end of this topic.

Naming the Associations in the PDM

When you define relationships in the CDM, you can specify role names. When a role name is specified for the part of the relationship that generates the association, the association is given a name in the PDM that reflects the role name.

If a role name is not specified, the association in the PDM is named the same as the entity from which the primary keys assigned to the association are taken. This is shown in the figures below:

Alternate Keys

In the case of tables with alternate keys (marked as "0..1" in the CDM), you must ensure that an empty string value is transferred to the loading procedure for keys where no value is to be provided.

Deprecation

To prevent your data model from incompatible changes, outdated objects are not deleted. Instead, a deprecation concept has been introduced, in which these objects are marked as deprecated. This means that you should no longer use them. We do not recommend that you delete these objects yourself. Please update your data model if you are using deprecated objects.

For example, the following objects are deprecated:

Entities

Attributes

Relationships

As shown in the following figure, you can find a reason for the deprecation in the properties of the deprecated object and, if applicable, by which other object the deprecated one was replaced.

To identify deprecated objects, see the What's New document for deprecated objects of the current release for SAP Financial Services Data Management.

Displaying Non-Generated Objects

For a reduction of tables in SAP HANA, some CDM entities have an indicator in the CDM that suppresses the generation of these entities in the PDM and, in the case of inheritances, appends their fields to other entities and their tables. The indicator Generate on the General tab of the entity properties is empty for objects that do not generate any entity in the PDM.

Some relationships are also not generated since it is possible to use existing relationships between entities.

The information about which relationship to use for the non-generated relationship is on the Extended Attributes tab page of each relationship in the CDM, as shown below:

The SAP PowerDesigner shows this information with a dotted line instead of a continuous line.

If you do not need this information, you can switch off its display in the data model using the showGeneration parameter in the Extended Attributes tab page in the FSDM_CDM_Extension extension.

More Information

For more information, see the related entities and their definitions in the data model represented in SAP PowerDesigner.
Adding Relationships