Business Anchor 

Definition

Business anchor is a reference to a data source. When you associate a data source to an interaction component, the Mobile Application Studio creates an anchor automatically. The anchor acts as the link that connects the business logic and the user interface. If an interaction component is associated with more than one data source, the interaction component contains one business anchor for each association.

Business anchors exist at the tile, tile set, and business component levels.

Use

At design time, a business object (BO) or business query (BQ) is associated with an interaction component. At runtime, the business anchor contains data from the associated data source. Based on the data source property used in a tile, data from the user database displays in the user interface.

At design time, a business anchor is associated with the Order business object. At runtime, this business anchor contains details of an order in the user interface.

There are two types of business anchors.

·        Bound business anchors associate the properties of this data source with the controls in the tile. For example, the Name text field is associated to the Name property of the Customer business object.

Use bound anchors to:

¡        Specify the BO or BQ that is associated with the tile.

¡        Establish and display a relationship between the interaction components according to the relationship that exists with the underlying business object layer (BOL) objects.

·        Unbound business anchors are not associated to a data source. Unbound anchors serve as a common node that contains all unbound controls. Any control that is not associated with a data source is represented by an unbound anchor. For example, labels and button controls are unbound anchors.

Structure

The business anchors can be:

·        Arranged in an anchor hierarchy between the data sources that referred to by the business anchors. Creating an anchor hierarchy enables you to display related data in a tile, tile set, or a business component of a mobile client application. For more information, see Business Anchor Hierarchy.

A tile set has tiles displaying details of a customer and the orders created for the customer. You create a business anchor hierarchy to link the customer and order business objects. This enables the Orders tile to display orders, which belong the customer selected in the Customer tile.

·        Mapped for the tiles, which are associated to the same data source, to share information. This task is performed manually. For more information, see Business Anchor Mapping.

A tile set consists of tiles displaying the customer list and the customer details. As these tiles are associated with the same data source, Customer, the anchors associated with these tiles must be mapped.