Integration Platform Technologies: Siebel Enterprise Application Integration > External Business Components >

Usage and Restrictions for External Business Components

The following usage guidelines and restrictions apply to EBCs:

• Creating and populating the external table is the responsibility of the customer. Consult your database administrator for the appropriate method to use.
• EBCs cannot be docked, so they do not apply to mobile users on the Siebel Mobile Web Client. Siebel Remote is not supported.
• EBCs support many-to-many relationships with the limitation that for such relationships the intersection table must be from the same data source as the child business component.
• EBCs cannot be loaded using the Enterprise Integration Manager.
• EBCs rely on the Business Object Layer of the Siebel Architecture. Therefore, EBCs are used only in Siebel Server components using this layer such as the Application Object Manager (for example, the Call Center Object Manager), Workflow Process Manager, and so on. EBCs are not used on components not using this layer, such as Workflow Policies (the Workflow Monitor agent) and Assignment Manager.
• The Id field must be mapped to an underlying column in the external table to support insert, update, delete, and query operations.
• Using the Oracle Sequence Object to populate the Id system field is not supported. The value of the Id system field has to be known by the object manager at the record commit time, while the Oracle Sequence Object value is populated by the database server when the change is being processed inside the database.
• If the column that was mapped to the Id system field has Primary Key checked, then row ID values are generated by the object manager. Otherwise, a user-entered row ID value is assumed, and the object manager does not generate a row ID value for it.

  However, in either configuration, the Primary Key column must not use the Oracle Sequence Object.

• EBCs with non-English data require the Siebel S_APP_VER and S_SYS_PREF tables to be present in the external database.

  Siebel Business Applications use the UNICD_DATATYPS_FLG column of the S_APP_VER table to indicate whether the database is a Unicode database. A value of 8 means UTF-8, and Y means UTF-16. For Non-Unicode databases, the Enterprise DB Server Code Page system preference is also required to have the correct setting.

  For help with creating and populating these tables, contact your Oracle sales representative for Oracle Advanced Customer Services to request assistance from Oracle's Application Expert Services.

• For EBCs that contain multivalue groups, if a primary join is enabled, then both the parent and the child business components must be from the same data source. Multivalue groups are also supported as long as such configuration does not require that a distributed join or a subquery be performed.
• Siebel visibility control (for example, ViewMode) is not supported for EBCs.
• An external join alias must have the same name as the name used for the external table.
• EBCs based on Database views can be used for queries only; updates are not supported.
• For EBCs that have a parent-child relationship, their related external tables must not have a foreign key constraint set between them on the external database. If they do have a foreign key constraint, then Copy and Deep Copy functionality will not work.

NOTE:  Significant configuration effort and changes might be required if you choose to reconfigure a standard Siebel business component on an external table. For example, existing join and link definitions are unlikely to function, because the source fields and underlying columns might not exist in the external table.