Integration Platform Technologies: Siebel eBusiness Application Integration Volume ll > Integration Objects > About the Structure of Integration Objects >

About Integration Components and Associations

Siebel business objects are made up of business components that are connected by a link. An association is a business component that represents the intersection table that contains these links. The integration component definition of associations is similar to that of multi-value groups (MVGs). User properties Association and MVGAssociation on the integration component denote that the corresponding business component is an associated business component or an associated MVG, respectively. For fields that are defined on MVG associations, External Name denotes the name of the business component field as it appears on the parent business component, and the user property AssocFieldName denotes the name of the business component field as it appears on the MVG business component.

For example, the Contact business object is partly made up of the Contact and Opportunity business components. The association between these two business components is represented by the Contact/Opportunity link with a value or a table name in the Inter Table column. The Integration Object Builder wizard creates a new integration component for the integration object based on the Contact business object that represents the association. As shown in Figure 5, the Opportunity integration component has one user property defined: the Association user property, set to a value of Y.

Figure 5.  Integration Component Representation of Association

NOTE:  When building an integration object, if an integration component is an association based on an intersection table, the user key for this integration component cannot contain fields based directly or indirectly on the same association intersection table.