This feature is a design principal that takes into consideration
future growth and change.
Every customer has unique requirements, to facilitate this, full
extensibility of the user interface is enabled.Sterling Warehouse Management System supports extensibility at all key layers of the
application. This includes support through the User interface, Business
logic, Data Model layers. Extensibility is also available at the service
layer, enabling API and data extensibility. Extensions are upgradeable
and can be preserved through upgrades with no impact.
- User interface
User Interface extensibility enables you to customize the UI
based on your business requirements. For example, allowing for the
display and capture of additional information, enhancing the flow
of an existing interface or adding new flows. In general two types
of extensibility exist. They are Full Extensibility and Differential
Extensibility. Differential Extensibility enables businesses to define
extensions over and beyond the out of box functionality. In this mode,
the customer only defines and owns the defined extensions and the
out of box screens remain intact. This facilitates smoother upgrades
by allowing the out of the box components to be upgraded while leaving
the extensions intact. The following Sterling user interfaces support
UI extensibility:
- Sterling Business Center and Sterling Field Sales – based
on the WebUI framework; supports full and differential extensibility.
- Application Console UIs – based on JSP and javascript; supports
full extensibility RCP applications.
- Sterling Call Center, IBM Sterling Store – based on Eclipse
Rich Client Platform; supports full and differential extensibility.
- Data model
Data Model extensibility enables you to extend the Sterling
data model. Included is ability to add columns to existing tables,
Custom columns treated like product columns: These columns can be
persisted, searched, fetched using standard out of the box APIs as
if they were defined with the product In addition, the database framework
allows you to extend the application database by creating custom or
hang-off tables. A custom table is an independent table and cannot
be modeled as an extension to a standard application database table.
- Business logic- service layer
Extensibility in the backend helps you perform custom business
logic and processing. This layer can be extended to make use of your
database extensions and can also be extended to implement custom logic
through the use of user exits. User exits are used to run custom processing.
Custom logic can be driven by integration with other applications,
changed use cases, and other special requirements of an application.
Backend extensibility allows you to change the server-side APIs to
perform the customized business logic.
- Example : If customers need to extend the Order API’s by
invoking custom pricing logic, they will implement a “getOrderPriceUE”,
Similarly, if custom validations need to be performed before creating
a order, “beforeCreateOrderUE” could be defined. These
user exits have defined input and output XMLs.
In addition Events can be used to expand the behavior
of an API. Events do not impact business behavior of API, they add
additional capability.
- Example: CreateOrder.on success event could be used to send an
email to consumer for consumer orders. This scenario of extensibility
does not require any custom Java coding.