Objects and classes
Ensure you are familiar with the differences between master data management objects and business objects, and the different types of loaders.
Objects
- Master data management objects
- A solution developer can directly use master data management objects
to manage the data in the master data management system.
- Business objects
- A solution developer will need to create the business objects
for managing the business data in the target system. Below is the
current implementation for WebSphere Commerce business objects.
Classes
- Exporter classes
- The exporter classes create the transaction objects for publishing
different master data management objects, for example, catalog entries,
catalog groups, attribute dictionary attributes, and so on to WebSphere® Commerce.
There are exporter classes for each of the object types which initializes the loader and transformer objects for the export and publishing.
The export objects are initialized by the exporter classes which are inherited from the GenericCatalogObjectExport class, which is the top level class which initiates the export for any of the objects.
Exporter classes declare the transformer and loader classes for each object type.
Exporters gather the objects to be exported in XML format from master data management and invoke the transformers and loaders.
- Transformer classes
- There is a transformer class defined for each of the object types.
These classes set the mapping files for each of the object types.
These mapping files are copied when a user installs Advanced Catalog
Management. The paths for mapping are provided in the acm.properties file.
Transformers transform the XML format objects from master data management to the formats compatible to WebSphere Commerce using the mapping files.
- Loader classes
- Loaders are defined by loader classes for each of the object types.
These are inherited from the AbstarctBatchLoader or AbstractWebService loaders.
Depending on this inheritance, objects are loaded using data loader
or web services.
Loaders load the objects transformed by transformer classes to WebSphere Commerce using either data load or web services based on the object types and quantity.