Party Model Unifies Access to Data

The party model is a means of unifying all access to data about relationships. This covers relationships between your company and people (contacts, employees, partner employees, users) and other businesses (accounts, divisions, organizations, partners). The base table for all such access is S_PARTY. Related tables are implicitly joined as extension tables. The following table lists the extension tables and their corresponding EIM interface tables.

Data Type	Extension Table to S_PARTY	EIM Interface Table
Accounts	S_ORG_EXT	EIM_ACCOUNT
Business Units	S_BU	EIM_BU
Contacts	S_CONTACT	EIM_CONTACT
Employees	S_CONTACT	EIM_EMPLOYEE
Groups	S_ORG_GROUP	EIM_GROUP
Organizations	S_ORG_BU	EIM_ORG_BU
Positions	S_POSTN	EIM_POSITION
Users	S_USER	EIM_USER

Because the extension tables are implicitly joined to S_PARTY, you do not need to configure anything to access them through S_PARTY. Some data types have a many-to-many relationship. For example, any contact can be associated with multiple accounts or partners. To model these relationships there are preconfigured intersection tables: S_PARTY_PER and S_PARTY_REL. Use S_PARTY_REL to implement relationships between parties in the S_PARTY table. In this case, records in S_PARTY are both parent (PARTY_ID) and child (PERSON_ID).

Use S_PARTY_PER to implement relationships between members:

• Access groups and members

• Accounts and contacts

• Employees and positions

• User lists and users