Relationship
A relationship captures how entities are related to each other. Two relationship types are available in TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks Plug-in for SmartMapper, association and identity.
A participant is the role that an entity plays in a relationship. In TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks Plug-in for SmartMapper, the role that an entity plays is that of itself.
Association Relationship
An association relationship has two and only two participants. They are used to model a relationship of two typically orthogonal entities, like teachers and classes, as shown in the table, or a relationship of the same entity, like a part-subpart containment relationship.
An association relationship is quite different from an identity relationship. An association relationship describes a relationship between participants that belong to two different kinds like customer and order; while an identity relationship describes a relationship of participants that belong to a same kind from different systems like the order ID in different systems.Identity Relationship
All participants are peers in an identity relationship. It is used to keep the corresponding keys of different applications. For example, after a company merger involving several applications, you are given the task to create a cross-reference of keys for three data file dumps, one for SAP, one for Siebel, and one for Oracle.
The following table indicates the simplest case, that is, a customer record is displayed in each application once and only once (the relationship cardinality is 1-1-1).
When a customer record is not in all the applications, and the record is in one application, it can be found only once (the relationship cardinality is 1-1-1).
When one customer record is not displayed or is displayed more times in the applications, the identity relationship is as follows (the relationship cardinality is M-M-M).