One of the key aspects of integrating the ATG platform with a remote system is sharing data between the two systems. Data sharing and synchronization are often complex, because the two systems may store their data in dissimilar formats. The ATG platform data is typically stored in a Dynamo repository, which handles the mapping of data in Java objects to the underlying data store (such as a SQL database).
The ATG Integration Framework includes a data binding facility for reading and writing data between a repository and XML documents. Using this facility, you can write out repository data to XML documents that can then be read into a remote system, or read data into a repository from XML documents that store data from a remote system. A key aspect of this system is the use of mapping files to specify the data to include or exclude, and to map the names of repository properties to the names used by the remote system. The data binding facility also includes tools for generating XML Schemas that describe the structure of data in a repository, and to use these XML Schemas to validate the data written out from or read into the repository.
The data binding facility provides services that perform these four operations with repository items:
Getting items (retrieving items from a repository and writing them out to XML documents)
Adding items (creating new items in a repository from data in XML documents)
Updating items (modifying existing items using data in XML documents)
Removing items (deleting items as indicated in XML documents)
This chapter discusses:
Note that the classes described in this chapter work only with repositories included in the initialRepositories property of the /atg/registry/ContentRepositories component.
