Information Catalog Manager Programming Guide and Reference

A programmer's view of the Information Catalog Manager object types

The administrator managing an object type with the user interface or tag language is aware only of working with an object type. However, when you write a program using the Information Catalog Manager API calls to manage an object type, you need to be aware that there are two parts of the object type: the object type registration and the object type itself.

Object type registration

The object type registration contains overall information about the object type, including:

• Category the object type belongs to
• Extended (NAME) and short (DPNAME) names of the object type
• Name of the information catalog database table containing the object instance information

When you create or update the object type registration, you also give the Information Catalog Manager the name of an icon file associated with the object type.

Object type

The object type defines the properties that are used for each object. These properties, such as OWNER and DESCRIPTION, contain information about the information source described by each object.

The above two parts require separate maintenance functions, which are provided by the following the Information Catalog Manager API calls:

For object type registration:	For object type:	Purpose
FLGCreateReg	FLGCreateType	Define a new object type or object type registration
FLGGetReg	FLGGetType	Get information about an object type or object type registration
FLGUpdateReg	FLGAppendType	Change the definition of an object type or object type registration
FLGDeleteReg	FLGDeleteType FLGDeleteTypeExt	Delete an object type or object type registration

When you create or delete an object type, you need to use the FLGCreateReg and FLGCreateType calls or FLGDeleteType and FLGDeleteReg calls as pairs to make sure that complete object types are created or deleted. Object type registrations that do not have associated object types with defined properties are useless and can cause problems if you later try to use these object types to define objects in your information catalog.

You cannot change or delete object type properties after you create the object type; you can only append new optional properties using the FLGAppendType call (see FLGAppendType).