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About Reusing Business Components

In general, business components in the out-of-the-box repository should be reused as much as possible. However, only those business components whose intended uses have a valid functional and technical fit with your requirements should be reused. For example, you would use the Contact business components to store individual details and the Account business components to store details of the business relationship with a customer. You should not use the Service Request business components to store non-Service Request related entities like financial transactions or order history. In other words, the out-of-the-box use of the business component should match that of your intended use.

When reusing a Siebel business component, you should configure it to be as flexible and reusable as possible. For example, in one release you may implement customer complaints using the Service Request business component and in another release, change of addresses. In both cases, the Service Request business component should be used, rather than cloning the business component in subsequent releases for other service transactions. For example, you could use the "SR Type" field to distinguish between the two service transactions. Your business rules should also be as generic as possible to facilitate the use of a single business component.

Inappropriately reusing a business component may also make it difficult to reuse the same business component for its intended purpose in the future. Using the example given above, if the Service Request business component is used to store financial transactions in one release, it may prevent you from reusing the same business component to store actual service requests in future releases.

When no suitable out-of-the-box business component exists, it may be necessary to create a new one. It may also be necessary to use Database Extensibility to create a new table. For more information see, Creating Business Components and About Database Extension Options.

There are a number of factors that may influence whether you need to reuse or create a new business component.

• Specialized classes. If you use a business component based on a specialized class for a purpose other than the purpose for which it was intended, the class code may result in indeterminate issues that are difficult to debug. For example, you may choose to use the eEvents Parent Event business component to store data unrelated to events management. However, specialized code will cause the automatic creation of sub-events, which is probably undesirable for your custom requirements. Instead of misusing a specialized business component, consider creating a new business component.
• Party-based business component. Business components based on the S_PARTY table have significant influence on areas such as access control and remote visibility. They should never be used for purposes other than which they were intended.
• Licensing. Unused business components that are not licensed for your configuration cannot be reused.
• Repository business components. Repository business components (those that start with "Repository") should never be used by the developer for custom purposes.

Related Topics

About Business Components

Guidelines for Configuring Business Components