Hierarchy Developer's Guide for Oracle Self-Service E-Billing > Basic Hierarchy Manager Use Cases >

Configuring Hierarchy Types

Hierarchy Manager supports configurable hierarchy types. You can change the properties of preconfigured hierarchy types and add additional hierarchy types when necessary. Each hierarchy type can have name, code, description and allowable link targets for that type. Code in a hierarchy type uniquely identifies the type object. The IHierarchyTypeManager interface can be used to find all hierarchy types and the valid link targets for each type.

The following aspects of hierarchy type are configurable:

• Number of hierarchy types supported
• Name of each hierarchy type
• Valid link target types each hierarchy type allows
• Valid children types for each link target allowed in a hierarchy type
• Some special behavior for hierarchy importer and exporter

By default, Hierarchy Manager supports two types of hierarchy: Billing and Business. The default type configuration is shown in the file:

EDX_HOME\xma\config\modules\hierarchy\Hierarchy.cfg.xma.xml (slashes reversed on Windows).

The preceding bean entries define the two hierarchy types that will be supported: "BusinessHierarchyType" and "BillingHierarchyType". To add new additional types, simply add a new bean into the "types" list.

The BusinessHierarchyType is configured in the following example:

Notes about example:

1. "name" specifies the resource bundle key for displaying the name of this hierarchy type.
2. "code" is a unique string value to identify business hierarchy type. It is recommended that you do not change this value.
3. "validLinkTarget" is a list of valid link target object can be linked into this type of hierarchy. For more information, see HierarchyFolderConfig and CompanyConfig.
4. "linkTargetRelationship" specifies the rule by which a link target can be linked in as a child node. The list includes all link targets that might have restricted their list of link targets when they linked into hierarchies.
5. Indicates that for Service Agreement objects in business type of hierarchy, there is no any valid link target can be linked in as its child. In other words, Service Agreement must be the leaf node of business hierarchy.
6. Indicates that in Business Hierarchy, Company objects can have folders as its child node.
7. "hierarchyExchangeConfiguration"specifies certain override-able behaviors when dealing with hierarchy import and export.

The following file specifies the default Billing Hierarchy type: