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.
The following two relationship types are used in the plug-in:
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.| Teacher | Class (Grade-Class Number) |
|---|---|
| Jody | 2-1 |
| Jody | 2-2 |
| Dover | 2-1 |
| Dover | 1-1 |
| McDonald | 1-2 |
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).
| SAP_Customer | Siebel_Account | Oracle_Customer |
|---|---|---|
| A | 1 | 1234 J |
| B | 2 | 1222 K |
| C | 3 | 1433 L |
| D | 4 | 4123 M |
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).
| SAP_Customer | Siebel_Account | Oracle_Customer |
|---|---|---|
| NULL | 1 | 1234 J |
| B | 2 | 1222 K |
| C | 3 | 1433 L |
| D | 4 | 4123 M |
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).
| SAP_Customer | Siebel_Account | Oracle_Customer |
|---|---|---|
| NULL | 1 | 1234 J |
| B | NULL | 1222 K |
| 1122 M | ||
| C | 3 | NULL |
| F | 5 | |
| D | 4 | 4123 M |
| E |