Modeling the data of business objects

Although you can use the IBM® Sterling Transformation Extender Design Studio to represent the properties of individual fields, elements, and records, its strength lies in defining complete business objects. In the IBM Sterling Transformation Extender Design Studio, business objects are the substance of business transactions such as the following: health claims, invoices, bank transfers, airline reservations, ship notices, or telephone bills.

Business objects that include interface syntax, semantics, and structure are implemented in the IBM Sterling Transformation Extender products as schemas, which may be pre-defined (in the case of standards supported out-of-the-box by IBM Sterling Transformation Extender), imported from metadata, or defined using the IBM Sterling Transformation Extender schema designer. Once defined, they can be re-used to describe interface content for multiple sources and targets.

  • Use the Type Designer to define properties for text or binary data, different character sets, data structures, and semantic validation rules. The resulting type definition is enforced automatically and transparently, when the IBM Sterling Transformation Extender system executes.
  • When external metadata exists, you can reduce the effort of defining business objects by using application importers. For example, you can use the COBOL Copybook Importer to generate schemas from COBOL record structures, or the Database Interface Designer to generate type trees from database catalog entries. You can use the DTD Importer to generate type trees from XML Document Type Definitions (DTDs). SAP R/3 users can generate type trees from application-maintained metadata, using IBM Sterling Transformation Extender-supplied importers.
  • IBM Sterling Transformation Extender products provide a repository of predefined type trees for popular e-commerce, healthcare, insurance, and financial standards, including ASC X12, EDIFACT, HIPAA, HL7, SWIFT, ISO 15022, and others.
  • Using the Type Tree Maker, which is also part of the IBM Sterling Transformation Extender Design Studio, you can build your own importer to automate the capture of metadata definitions from machine-readable sources.

Regardless of method used, the result is a set of reusable business object definitions encapsulated in a schema.