Glossary of OBN Terminology

business object

An object that is used to model a business process. A business object is a semantic entity, which represents the smallest logical unit to take part in a business scenario. Examples of business objects

in the SAP NetWeaver Portal include "customer", "invoice", "order", "material", and "Collaboration object".

A business object in the portal persists in the PCD (Portal Content Directory) and is used for advanced navigation.

There are two types of portal business objects:

system business object (SBO)

context business object (CBO)

system business object (SBO)

A PCD object representing a business object from a backend system; it is defined according to the business object metadata in the backend system.

context business object (CBO)

A PCD object created by an application developer to represent some business context.

business object operation operation

An extension of the business object, that represents any number of navigation options.

The operation makes the connection between the business object and the application (iView, Page, ...) that returrns information relating to the business object.

Priority

An operation property determining its order of implementation during navigation. Without user intervention, the operation having the highest priority is implemented by default.

OBN target

(target iView / page, implementing iView / page)

The navigation object, returned by a business object operation, that contains requested and relevant business information, according to the user role.

OBN implementation

A specific, role-based operation-to-target configuration.

A business object operation has as many implementations as it has targets. The implemention name is what appears in an OBN context menu in runtime (display name). By default, the implementation name is the same as the operation name, but this can be edited in the Object-Based Navigation Editor.