1. Implementing Innovation Management
  2. How You Enable Item Class Mapping in Product Development Connector

How You Enable Item Class Mapping in Product Development Connector

The Product Development (PD) connector supports flexible mapping of Innovation Management (IM) concept and component classes to Product Development item classes. In concept structures, you can also map specific user-defined attributes to item attributes in item structures.

The support of flexible mapping includes these integration scenarios:

  • Convert concept component to item;

  • Copy item to concept component; and,

  • Display item data in concept structure.

Run the following administrative tasks.
  1. Navigate to the Product Development work area (logged in as an administrator). Open the side panel and, in Settings, click Manage Configurations. From the Settings tab, set up the Default Organization: this will be the item organization when you convert concept components to items in Product Development. Be sure to select the Default Organization.

  2. Define an item class for each different type of component. In Innovation Management, open Setup and Maintenance. Navigate to Manage Target System. Create a new Product Development connector by duplicating it from the Oracle Template ORA_PD

  3. Go to Manage Mapping to External System and click the Add + button to add a subentity - a subclass of the Item class. Select the new item class and add class-specific extensible flex-fields (EFFs).

    Note: Add EFF attributes on the same hierarchy level of the item class on which the EFF is defined. Also, remember that only one connector can be active at a time.
  4. In Innovation Management, go to Manage Mapping where you enable class-specific mapping for the mapping sets Create Item (CDMCreateItem), Copy Item (CDMCopyItem) and Link Item (CDMLinkItem). Select the Mapping Set to which you want to add the class mapping. Then select the entity Item and add the subclass you created.
  5. Select the additional item class and add the Innovation Management (IM) attribute to Item EFF mapping (in the Attribute section). You've created a user-defined attribute for a concept structure in Innovation Management (IM), created an EFF in an item structure in Product Development, and now the data can go from the concept structure to the item structure. Repeat these steps for every type and class combination to be mapped.
    Note: As a parent class must be added to the mapping before its child classes can be mapped, you may add dummy mappings for intermediate classes if they don't correspond to a concept component type. In this case, the user can type in any value for Innovation Management (IM) Entity Name column.