A maintenance object represents a primary table and child tables that are maintained as a logical unit. Each maintenance object has a page maintenance application service (runtime program) responsible for manipulating and validating the primary record and related child records defined in its tables. When records related to a maintenance object are archived or purged, records in the primary table and related child tables are automatically archived/purged at the same time. The system examines the constraints defined on the maintenance object's tables to ensure this is done.
Unless your implementation has defined custom tables, you are not required to configure maintenance objects used in archiving and purging. All of the maintenance objects are populated when the system is installed. The information on maintenance objects is provided as background to make the archiving and purging functions easier to understand.
For example, the bill segment page is responsible for maintaining a CI_BSEG record along with its related CI_BSEG_READ records, CI_BSEG_CALC records, CI_BSEG_CALC_LN records, etc. Below is an illustration of the BILL SEG maintenance object. Notice that the tables are defined with roles of either Primary or Child. Also note that the constraint representing the parent-child relationship is also defined for each table.
