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Property Sets

Property sets are used internally to represent Siebel EAI data. A property set is a logical memory structure that is used to pass the data between business services. Figure 24 illustrates the concept of a property set.

Figure 24. Property Set Structure

The property set contains four parts:

• Type. Used to describe what type of object is being represented.
• Value. Used to hold serialized data, such as a string of XML data.

  NOTE:  In Siebel Tools, a Value argument to a method is shown with the name of <Value>, including the angle brackets. You can also define a Display Name for the Value argument in Siebel Tools. This Display Name appears in the Siebel Business Process Designer when you are building integration workflows. In this guide, the Display Name Message Text is shown when referring to the Value argument, and the Name <Value> is shown when referring to the Value of the Value argument.

• Properties. A table containing name-value pairs. You can use the properties to represent column names and data, field names and data, or other types of name-value pairs.
• Children. An array of child-level property sets. You can use the array to represent instances of integration objects. For example, a result set might contain an Account with some set of contact records from the database. Each contact record is represented as a child property set.

It is recommended that you treat input property sets in business services as constants. If you must modify the inputs, then make a copy first. Otherwise, there might be interference between business service scripts and workflows that also modify the inputs, leading to unpredictable application behavior.

For example, when creating the XMLHierarchy property set using a custom business service in a workflow, if the input property set is modified without making a copy, then the following error occurs:

Argument 'XMLHierarchy' in step 'Convert XMLHierarchy' is not correctly initialized or does not return valid data.(SBL-BPR-00107)

NOTE:  For more information on property sets and their methods, see Siebel Object Interfaces Reference.