Unification 

Purpose

The unification capabilities of the SAPNetWeaver portal maximize the usefulness of portal navigation. Drag&Relate navigation and the ability to manipulate relations between business objects increase the relevance of the retrieved data to the business context and requirements of the user. What makes this possible is the ability of the unification services to resolve relations between business objects from the company’s back-end applications.

Multi-System Drag&Relate

Unification can find relations between objects from within a single system, and between objects from disparate systems. This offers the user correlation of a wide range of business information by means of simple navigation metaphors such as Drag&Relate, click and relate, and right-click context menus.

Integration

The unification infrastructure is an integral part of the portal. Its services and components function synchronously as part of the portal runtime. However, since the value of unification is in the representation of data from back-end systems, additional components, and often configuration in the back end, are necessary to enable connectivity.

·        To attain access to any application from the portal, a resource adapter, or connector is required.

A connector to SAP applications, including R/3 and BW is supplied with the portal.

·        To access the databases of any database management system, a JDBC connector is also supplied with the portal.

A driver must also be available to communicate with each particular database. The portal supplies drivers for a number of popular database management systems.

For more information, see Unification with SAP R/3 and BW.

Features

Unification allows the portal user during runtime to enjoy navigation which is directed specifically to the information required by the user’s roles in the organization. However, it is the content creator and/or administrator who uses, and is more closely aware of unification features:

Unification and related features:

Feature	Description	Comment
Relationship Editor	A graphical display of the business objects for which the portal administrator wishes to view and/or edit relations with other business objects.	Core unification utility
Single Relation Editor	An interface of the Relationship Editor in which specific relations between business objects can be manipulated and edited to create manual relations. Manual relations are exportable to other portal systems when the relevant objects are imported to those systems in a transport package. For detailed information about transport packages, see Transport of Portal Objects.	Core unification utility
Enhanced Object-Based Navigation	Enables Object-Based Navigation iViews to resolve relations.	OBN is portal is an ancillary unification feature that makes use of core unification services
Query-based iViews with Drag&Relate links enabled by iView Wizard	Allows wizard-based creation of iViews, based on queries, to which Drag&Relate links can be added.	Example of how unification services are available for use of other portal navigation components
Web Target iViews	Allows the retrieval of business object related data from a URL-based source.	Example of how unification services are available for use of other portal navigation components

Relation resolving, and the ability to exercise control over the relationships between back-end system business objects, is the core of NetWeaver unification capabilities.

Example

A simple example of the use of unification Drag&Relate is dragging a particular material, such as copper tubing, onto an iView representing a list of your customers. A result set returns listing all of your customers who purchase copper tubing.

However, to show added value of unification relation resolving, suppose the content developer deletes the direct foreign key relationship between customers and materials and edits the relation (thereby creating a manual relation), forcing it through additional step by adding a condition from a list of regions. A sales person performing the Drag&Relate operation now would still receive a list of customers who buy copper tubing, but only for the region for which that sale person is responsible.

See Unification with SAP R/3 and BW for a detailed example of the process flow for enabling unification features with core SAPsystems.