About Variable Maps

Siebel order management applications that use the PSP engine—such as for pricing, eligibility, and product recommendation—require a consistent way of loading, querying, and synchronizing transactional data. For example, the Quote Item and Order Entry - Line Items business components represent fundamentally the same concept, but can use different field names to represent the same value. Variable maps meet this requirement.

Variable maps are also used to extend the capabilities of customizable product linked items. A linked item can now refer to a value in a Context property set constructed by the variable maps mechanism. For more information about linked items, see Siebel Product Administration Guide.

Variable maps provide a mechanism for mapping transactional data to a common namespace regardless of the data source. PSP procedures rely on variable maps to map the name of a variable used by a PSP procedure to a field in a Siebel business component or to an attribute used in attribute pricing.

The variable map mechanism employs the Context Service business service, which provides a set of APIs for constructing a property set from the current ordering context and synchronizing changes to that property set back to the source. You can configure the set of data queried and written by a particular transaction.

Note: The variable map APIs work only during an event triggered on a business component derived from CSSBCOrderMgmtBase, CSSBCPecBase, and their subclasses.

You define the particular variable map used by a PSP procedure in the Signals Administration views (navigate to the Administration - Order Management screen, then the Signals view).