Real Time Information Director User Documentation

RTID Metadata Language
Hewlett-Packard Company 4 529618-002
Overview of this Document
This document covers the following topics. Words in boldface type are terms that will be
defined in context in this document.
• Reasons to customize the Director metadata
• General characteristics of Director metadata
• Specifying native document definitions
Document content metadata
• Specifying document definitions for SAP IDocs
More about content metadata
Document format metadata
Predefined and custom formatters
Variant, aliased, and substitute document definitions
• Enrichments
Metadata features to support data-store integration
Other ways to enhance incoming or outgoing data
• General tips for defining metadata
• Future directions for Director metadata
Role of Metadata
In the context of a real-time solution, the Director receives documents from source
systems or clients and inserts those documents into the data store. The Director can also
deliver documents to clients, either in response to queries or as a result of subscriptions to
the data store.
In supply-chain solutions, many documents are SAP Intermediate Documents (IDocs).
The Director supports IDocs expressed in XML. In healthcare solutions, many
documents are Health Level 7 (HL7) messages. Those messages have to be mapped to
XML, for instance by an EAI integration server, before submittal for processing by the
Director.
The Director also supports other kinds of XML documents, whose structure matches that
of corresponding records in the data store. See “Content Metadata and Native Document
Definitions.”
But no matter what the document type, the most important function of the Director is to
map between data elements in documents and rows and columns in the data store.
Metadata expresses the relationship between documents and the data store. You also use
metadata for other reasons:
• To enrich incoming or outgoing data in various ways (for example, to obtain a
unique key or to add data from elsewhere in the data base)
• To specify who is allowed to insert or retrieve specific types of documents