Alternate Dataset Evaluation

Every Service Order, Product Order, and Work Order in Fulfillment Provisioning may have an associated dataset, whose members are name/value pairs. These are used in many Fulfillment Provisioning features. (Refer to the TIBCO Fulfillment Provisioning Developer's Guide for details of the default behavior.) Dataset evaluation is particularly important for conditional expressions used in Fulfillment Provisioning Catalog associations and in data mapping configuration files. By default, Fulfillment Provisioning evaluates these expressions using dataset elements that it searches for in the following order:

  1. in the dataset of the current order

  2. in the dataset of any "parent" Product Order, then its parent Product Order, and so on

  3. and finally the dataset of the Service Order at the apex of the order hierarchy

These datasets are populated with data upstream in the flow, primarily when an incoming order is parsed, or during order decomposition.

Sometimes it may be useful to access datasets in another Product Order that is not an ancestor of the current order. The following paragraphs describe how to access the dataset of an arbitrary Product Order from another order associated with the same Service Order.

Note:

No mechanism is provided to access datasets in other service orders.

In addition to dataset values, it may sometimes be necessary to determine the value of selected attributes of the order objects themselves. You can enable the extra dataset feature of Fulfillment Provisioning to provide this type of access. The section called Using extra dataset describes how to use this feature.