Tutorial: Relationship manager administration

The relationship manager can be used to add, modify, and remove instances of relationships, which correlate identifiers from different environments for the same item of data. This tutorial demonstrates the basic functions of the relationship manager.

This tutorial demonstrates the basic functions of the IBM® Business Process Manager relationship manager. Relationships are used to correlate identifiers from different environments for the same item of data. For example, in one environment, states are identified by two-letter abbreviations (AZ, TX). In another environment, different abbreviations are used (Ariz., Tex.). A relationship would be created to correlate "AZ" in the first environment to "Ariz" in the second environment.

The sample relationship referenced here correlates customer IDs. Many business applications maintain databases of customers, and most of these applications assign their own ID to each customer. In an enterprise environment, the same customer likely has a different ID in each business application. In this tutorial, a relationship is defined to correlate customer IDs. The relationship name is "SampleCustID". Two roles are defined for this relationship. One role is for the Customer Information System (CIS), and the other role is for the General Ledger (GL) application. This relationship was created by the relationship services sample along with the roles and a small amount of sample data.

The relationship manager is designed to add, modify, and remove role instances of a relationship instance as well as add, modify, and remove relationship instances. IBM Integration Designer should be used to create and deploy new relationship definitions. The definitions are stored as XML files that are deployed as part of a Java EE application to a particular server.