Working with XML Catalogs
In Design Studio, you model behaviors such as business rules that satisfy the business requirements of order processing. The business rules are often contained in resource files such as XQuery files, XSLT files, custom JAR files, third-party JAR files, and XML files. There can be a large quantity of resources, and some of those resources need to reference each other. Resources in OSM can be referenced through URI locators in your data model.
Because a URI must be a physical location on a server, and because the location of the resource may change depending on the run-time system to which you deploy your cartridges, using XML Catalogs in OSM is very useful. XML Catalogs provide a redirection from a URI to another URI. At run time, when OSM processes a URI you specify as part of the OSM data model, OSM first attempts to resolve the URI against the XML Catalogs you specified. Based on the mapping defined in the XML Catalogs, OSM updates the URI to adapt to the environment by resolving the location of the URI in your data model with the new URI you mapped for it in the XML Catalogs.
When you specify URIs for resources that will be redirected to other URIs at run time by way of XML Catalogs, one strategy is to treat the URIs defined in your cartridge design as logical URIs that are replaceable tokens. Using this strategy, it is useful to have a well-defined naming convention for these URIs; for example, the URI schema would include your organization name, project name, type of cartridge, and type of data entity. For more information on packaging resources when using XML Catalogs, see OSM Developer's Guide.
You can use XML Catalogs for any of the URIs you specify in the Design Studio editors. You can specify XML Catalogs in your OSM cartridge projects as well as on the OSM server for different purposes. For detailed information on how to use XML Catalogs in OSM, see the discussion on XML Catalogs in OSM Developer's Guide.