Semantic Addressing Using Identifiable Business Contexts (IBCs)
Use
Addressing is handled by representing all addressable entities as Identifiable Business Contexts (IBCs). The Identifiable Business Context (IBC) is a concrete, addressable business application entity that is capable of acting as a party in an interaction. An IBC can be a natural or artificial person, an organization, a technical system, a client, or a specific application running on a system. The Identifiable Business Context (IBC) provides a unique way for all SAP applications to represent their business entities that should be visible outside a system. Using this representation, application logic is transported into the Web services framework, enabling addressing on a semantic level. Also, the level of addressing is no longer limited to the client, but it is possible to address entities on a more granular level.
During customizing, the application creates an IBC for all business entities that need to engage in communication. It is also possible to create IBCs in SOA Manager at a later point. In this way all business entities are listed in the SAP NetWeaver layer with the information relevant for business communication via Web services. The IBC also carries helpful information such as descriptions and contact data. The storage in the SAP NetWeaver layer has the advantage that the IBCs are as stable as the represented application entities. In the SAP NetWeaver layer, it is ensured that the IBC object is not modified unless the application confirms this. For each IBC, an interface for this callback must be implemented in the application.
For more information, see:
Defining Identifiable Business Contexts (IBCs)
Implementing a Class for IBC Usage
Until the concrete communication partners are known, an abstract IBC can be used to semantically represent a party or role in communication and impose requirements and constraints on the possible IBCs. At design time, integration scenario definitions are developed, in which the involved parties are represented by abstract IBCs that interact using a set of semantic contracts. When a definition like this is instantiated as a concrete scenario, concrete IBCs are assigned to these abstract IBCs, and a suitable contract definition is chosen for each semantic contract based on the contract implementations defined and implemented by the parties.
For more information, see:
Working with Integration Scenarios
To address an IBC in a remote system, an IBC reference has to be used. The IBC reference is like a copy of the original IBC and it is used for the configuration of integration scenarios.
For more information, see Creating IBC References.