1. Administrator's Guide
  2. Managing Property Definitions

9 Managing Property Definitions

Property definitions are used to manage the attributes of versions, hierarchies, and nodes in Oracle Data Relationship Management. Properties can store a variety of different data types including text, numeric, date, and references to other data objects. Properties can store explicit values, use inheritance to automatically assign values to descendant nodes, or be calculated based on a formula or lookup table. Property categories can be used to group and organize properties into related sets to simplify their usage and control user access.

System-defined properties that are available by default are used with standard product functionality. User-defined property definitions can be created by application administrators to manage additional attributes that are necessary to support business or system integration requirements.

Property definitions in Data Relationship Management can come from a variety of sources. For example, properties can be:

  • System-defined in Data Relationship Management

  • User-defined properties created by an application administrator

  • Loaded from application templates used with other Oracle products

  • Loaded from another Data Relationship Management application or environment using the Migration Utility

Namespaces

Namespaces are used in property definitions to avoid conflicts where properties from different sources have similar names and need to remain separate for data integrity purposes. Property names are differentiated using a namespace prefixing convention.

Table 9-1 Property Definition Example Using Namespaces

Field Example

Fully Qualified Name

Custom.AccountType

Namespace

Custom

Name

AccountType

Label

AccountType

There are special rules in Data Relationship Management that apply to namespaces to ensure that conflicts do not occur:

  • System-defined properties use the "Core" namespace.

  • User-defined properties use the "Custom" namespace.

  • Other namespaces are reserved for use by Data Relationship Management application templates for other Oracle products.