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Architecture Components

The following components are involved in the Metadata Business Service:

• Metadata Builder Engine. This component receives input from and provides output to the third party or Reference Configuration Sample. It controls the extraction of the metadata from the SRF, the creation of an internal application representation, the building of XML representation for output, the building of style sheets and the loading and saving of XML subscriptions.
• Third Party or Reference Configuration Sample. This sample is provided to show how to access the Metadata Business Service. The sample generates style sheets used by the third-party application and alerts based on defined business processes. It also allows the application developer to configure smcalert.cfg, the configuration file used by the Alert Business Service to determine the transport mechanism. It is hosted by an enterprise on a Microsoft Windows 2000 Web server. Third parties may wish to expose this capability within their own toolset, allowing developers to configure the third-party application.
• XML Builder. This component is a module within the Metadata Business Service that traverses the hierarchical tree of the application representation and builds an XML representation for it.
• Application Representation. This is a hierarchical tree structure of the object definitions obtained from the Extractor/Parser module. Each node in the hierarchical tree represents an object, such as a screen object, view object, applet object, and so forth.
• Extractor/Parser. The Extractor/Parser is the module that traverses the application definition in the SRF and retrieves the necessary information about the user interface elements. It extracts only the user interface components necessary to create the XML output needed to configure the application definition (that is, the application, screens, views, applets, columns and list controls).
• Style Sheet Builder. This component generates XSL style sheets conforming to the Siebel Web Engine DTD. The algorithm goes through each node of the application representation to check if the node is selected, and if so, the matching XML tag is copied.
• Load/Save Selections. This component saves the XML subscription the user is working on to a file in the local file system. When the user loads the subscription from the file, the Metadata Builder engine also extracts a new representation from the SRF (in case there were any changes to the application definition) and merges the subscription with the internal application representation. Subscriptions and business processes are saved in the siebsrvr\xml directory at the location where Siebel Server is installed.