Data Areas

The data area has no business purpose other than to provide a common schema location for re-used schema structures. It exists solely to help eliminate redundant element declaration. For example, if you have multiple schemas that share a common structure, you can set up a stand-alone data area schema for the common elements and then include it in each of the other schemas.

Be aware that a stand-alone data area can hold elements that are mapped to true fields. For example, you might have 50 different types of field activities and all might share a common set of elements to identify where and when the activity should take place. It would be wise to declare the elements that are common for all in a stand-alone data area and then include it in the 50 field activity business objects.

It's strongly recommended that you take advantage of stand-alone data areas to avoid redundant data definition!

Caution:

Dynamic inclusion! When the system renders a schema, all schemas included within it are expanded real-time. This means that any change you make to a data area will take effect immediately within all schemas it is referenced within. Therefore, changing a schema that is referenced in a large number of schemas may be too large to be performed online. In this situation, the change should be performed in batch. Refer to "Update Object Schema (F1-SCMUP)" batch control for more information.

This section describes additional topics related to designing and working with data areas.

Dynamic Extension

You may use a custom data to extend a base product data area. To extend another data area, reference that data area in the Extended Data Area field. By extending a data area you can add additional elements to a base product data area.

Here's an example of an extended data area:
  • The product releases with data area A, which contains elements a, b, and c.
  • Your implementation creates data area CM-A, which contains element z, and references data area A as the extended data area.
  • At run time, everywhere data area A is included it will contain elements a, b, c, and z.

Parent topic: Configuration Tools