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Virtual Business Components

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Business components based on external data are called virtual business components. Virtual business components are used when the business component has to obtain data from a location other than a database table in the Siebel database, but the information has to be presented in the standard Siebel user interface (applets and views). This is typically real-time information from another database, such as from the Report Encyclopedia in Actuate, or from an SAP table, although anything that can supply data in response to a SQL query is a candidate.

Virtual business components allow you to:

Represent external data (for example, data in an SAP R/3 database) as a virtual business component within a Siebel application—the business component configuration specifies the DLL to use to access the data
Use business services to transfer data

Virtual business components support properties such as:

Single-value fields
Field-level validation
Standard business component event model (for example, PreNewRecord, PreDelete, and so on)
Insert, delete, query, and update operations

Additional information about virtual business components:

Applets can be based on virtual business components.
Virtual business components can be accessed through object interfaces.
All business component events are available for scripting.
Virtual business components cannot be docked.
Virtual business components can be used as stand-alone or children business components in a business object.
Virtual business components can function as parent member of Link objects in 1:M relationships with standard business components.
Virtual business components generate Siebel row IDs the same way as standard business components.
M:M relationships involving virtual business components are not supported.
M:M relationships in an external system (for example, SAP) that function similarly to a 1:M relationship are supported.

Virtual business components allow developers to configure a business component based on an external, ODBC-based data source (that is, there is no need to write a business service to retrieve external data from an ODBC-compliant data source).

A user property (or property of the Business Component object) specifies whether a standard business component should use its specified table or a business service specified in the Service Name business component user property.

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