Developing with the Banking solution sample and Toolkit

The Banking Solution provides a solution template. Depending on your banking needs, you need to further build upon the banking solution template. A developer uses the spec model editor in the workbench to enhance the data model. All data model changes must be made through the workbench.

Prerequisites

The Banking Solution is only available in the IBM® Product Master.

The Banking Solution works by synchronizing data in the Product Master to data in the Physical Master Data Management. For the synchronizing to work, all of the data needs to be stored in the Product Master.

Setting working environment

After the Solution Toolkit is correctly installed, the Banking Solution data model and sample are correctly deployed as described in the previous sections, it is ready to use.

Make sure that the username and password, and the endpoint URL for the physical MDM are correctly specified in the mdm.properties file. No further setup is required.

Extending the data model

The Banking Solution data model includes:
  • Catalogs
  • Hierarchies and categories
  • Specs
  • Association of specs to catalogs, hierarchies, and categories
  • Sample product data
Modifying objects
More catalogs, hierarchies, categories, and product data can be easily added as necessary. The included data models can also be modified as needed.
Managing product offers in the IBM Product Master and the physical MDM
To synchronize products offers in the Product Master to the physical MDM, the following must take place:
  1. All of the data needs to be stored in Product Master.
  2. The data then is published to the physical MDM.
  3. If Product Master and the physical MDM are unified for the spec module, store the spec data in the same place.
For more information about managing product offers, see Managing offers.

Data synchronization

Data synchronization consists of the following:
  1. Synchronizing an item in Product Master to a product in the physical MDM.
  2. Synchronizing a category in Product Master to a category in the physical MDM.
  3. Synchronizing a spec in Product Master to a spec in the physical MDM.

Modifying the mapping

In the Banking solution sample, the following tasks take place:
  1. The user will author offers, items, and features data in Product Master through the user interface.
  2. The user publishes offers, items, and features to Advanced Edition in the format of Product Master XML data representation. This consists of the following:
    1. Retrieve XML data from Product Master.
    2. Send XML data from Product Master to the physical MDM through maintain-like transactions.
    3. Map data in the physical MDM through maintain-like transactions to the BObj that can be consumed by the physical MDM lower-level transaction. This can be done through the Adapter Service Interface (ASI).
Data mapping is defined in the following stylesheet (xsl) files:
  • For category: maintainCategory.xsl
  • For item: maintainMultipleProducts.xsl
  • For spec:
    • addSpec.xsl, for adding a new spec.
    • addSpecFormat.xsl, for adding and removing attributes from a spec that has been published before.
    • updateSpec.xsl, for updating attribute definitions of a spec that has been published before.
The construction of the BObj for each type of synchronization can be found in the corresponding XSL file. In most situations, additional BObjs cannot be generically and efficiently constructed in the XSL file; in such cases APIs is called to construct those additional BObjs. Therefore, modifying the mapping (which constructs the BObjs) requires modifying the XSL file as well the API for the corresponding synchronization.

Creating a collaborative MDM extension point to publish to the physical MDM

Perform the following steps to create a collaborative MDM extension point to publish to the physical MDM. For more details, see any of the workflows included in the sample data model.
  1. Define the workflow.
    Note: One workflow needs to be defined for the hierarchy, catalog, and spec.
  2. Configure the flow to the physical MDM instance.
    Note: The flow should start with the Initial Step, and end with the Publish Step, and the steps that the user can choose in case of failure.
  3. Specify the script, which invokes the extension point class to do the publishing to the physical MDM. For example,
    //script_execution_mode=java_api="japi://com.ibm.mdm.banking.extensionpoints.CategoryPublishWorkflowStepFunction.class
    This script invokes the class, which publishes a category.