Data Transformation Engine Getting Started

Chapter 1 - Introduction
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elements, and records, its strength lies in defining complete business objects. “Business objects” in
Mercator’s Design Studio are the substance of business transactions such as: health claims, invoices,
bank transfers, airline reservations, ship notices, or telephone bills.
Business objects, including all of their syntax, semantics and structure, are modeled using a combination
of automated importers of metadata, repositories of predefined data objects, an open importing facility,
and a graphical facility for specifying your own data object definitions and viewing existing ones. After
they are defined, they can be reused as the content of data sources and/or data targets, for all applicable
interfaces. Define once, use anywhere.
♦ Use the Type Designer to define properties for text or binary data, different character sets, data
structures, and semantic validation rules.
♦ There is a repository of pre-defined Mercator Type Trees that support complex business objects for
electronic commerce, healthcare, insurance, and financial services.
♦ When metadata exists, you can reduce the effort of defining data. You can use application importers
for a variety of packaged applications. For example, you can use the COBOL Copybook Importer
for COBOL data, and the Database Interface Designer to build type trees from database catalog
data. For XML Document Type Definitions (DTDs), you can use the DTD Importer. The DTD
Importer supports all the popular XML dialects. Users of the SAP R/3 adapters may use the IDoc
Importer, the BAPI Importer, and the BDC Importer to create type trees automated from the R/3
metadata stored in the SAP R/3 system.
♦ With Type Tree Maker, also part of the Design Studio, you can build your own importer to
automate the capture of metadata definitions from machine-processible sources.
No matter which methods you use, the result is a set of re-usable business object definitions,
encapsulated in a graphical tree-like structure, called a type tree. The following figure displays some
sample type trees as they are viewed with the Type Designer.