MetadataManager and Connection Architecture

The MetadataManager provides consolidated access to metadata objects that have been collected from one or more Connection objects that connect to underlying metadata stores (such as the Oracle Database or a BI Beans Catalog). This topic contains the following related information:

Connection bean architecture

A Connection bean serves as a connection mechanism to Oracle OLAP (which provides multidimensional data within the Oracle Database) and to the BI Beans Catalog. Each instance of a Connection bean represents a particular connection type based upon the type of the underlying server.

MetadataManager recognizes the following connection types:

MetadataManager bean architecture

The MetadataManager bean has the following characteristics:

Example: Merging the contents of multiple MDFolder objects

At runtime, the merging of the contents of multiple MDFolder objects is based upon the path name that is relative to the root that is specified for each connection instance.

Consider an application with the following assumptions:

An application developer can instantiate a MetadataManager bean with connections to both the OLAP service and the BI Beans Catalog, so that the QueryBuilder will present the end user with a single "Sales Data/Sportswear" folder that contains both the native measures in the OLAP folder and the calculated measures in the BI Beans Catalog folder.

Relationship between MetadataManager and Connection beans

The following relationships exist between the MetadataManager bean and the Connection beans that are associated with it:

Diagram: Relationship between MetadataManager and Connection beans

The following diagram presents the relationship between a single instance of a MetadataManager and multiple instances of Connection objects that are associated with the MetadataManager.

MetadataManager & Connection objects, as described in topic