Usually, the outbound interface of the sender software component and the inbound interface of the receiver software component are not identical.
This means that you must define mapping procedures to assign fields that are semantically identical (structure mapping) and conversion rules to convert to the target format (value mapping).
Structure of the Sender Outbound Interface
A structure mapping defines how the fields of the inbound message are to be mapped to the fields of the outbound message that will be sent to the receiver system. The figure, Structure of the Sender Outbound Interface, shows the structure of the sender message for the example scenario.
Data for a material master has to be transferred. A material master is specified uniquely by the MaterialID field. The fields IndustrySector, BaseUnit, and MaterialType are always transferred for the material. The document can also contain the MaterialGroup field (not used in this example). You can include as many language-specific descriptions for the material as required by using the substructure Description. The relevant language is saved as an ISO-language abbreviation in the Language field. The subnode Description can also occur more than once.
Structure of the Receiver Inbound Interface
For a receiver inbound interface too, the material is identified uniquely by the MaterialID field. The same fields for the material are expected as before. However, the target structure has an additional date field that the source document does not have. Furthermore, the target document can receive multiple materials.
The descriptions of the materials are not shown as substructures of the material, but instead are transferred in a separate node that is on the same level as the Material node. To enable the descriptions to be reassigned to the correct material in the target system, each Description node has the relevant ID in the MaterialID field. Both nodes are optional and can occur more than once in the document. Therefore, the inbound interface of the target system can be used both to import new materials and to include additional descriptions, for example, from a translation system.
Assignment Rules
To ensure that the target document is created correctly using the data from the source document, assignment rules need to be defined in the mapping program.
The assignment rules are as follows:
- You must create an instance of the Material node in the target document, and an instance of the Description node for each instance of the subsegment Description in the source structure.
- You must copy the fields MaterialID, IndustrySector, BaseUnit, MaterialGroup, and MaterialType from the source document to the fields of the same name in the target document.
- The target field Date has no equivalent source field. The mapping program must enter an appropriate value here.
- To assign language-dependent descriptions, you must copy the MaterialID field from the main segment of the source document to every instance of the Description segment in the target document. However, the Language and Description fields must be copied to a separate target node for each source node.
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