Starting and stopping relationships

Relationships are used to establish associations between business object attributes that cannot easily be mapped. The tool used for creating relationships is Relationship Designer Express. For more information about Relationship Designer Express, see the Map Development Guide.

When you expand the Relationships folder in the InterChange Server Component Management view, two subfolders appear: Dynamic and Static.

This section describes the following topics:

"Relationship activation"

Steps for starting and stopping relationships

Relationship table caching

Relationship activation

For a relationship to be executable, it must be activated. However, you cannot modify a relationship when it is active. Therefore, you must stop the relationship, modify it, and then restart it. See Appendix B, Requirements for restarting IBM WebSphere InterChange Server Express system components to find out what changes require relationships to be restarted.

Steps for starting and stopping relationships

Perform the following steps to start and stop relationships in System Monitor:

  1. From the System View window (see Figure 11), select Show Maps and Relationships from the View menu. The Maps and Relationships columns appear next to Collaborations and Connectors.
  2. Right-click a relationship, then select either Start RelationshipName or Stop RelationshipName.

Perform the following steps to start and stop relationships in System Manager:

  1. Expand the Dynamic or Static folder in the InterChange Server Component Management view (see Figure 33).
  2. Right-click the name of a relationship, and click Start RelationshipName or Stop RelationshipName.

Relationship table caching

As part of the design process of a static relationship, a developer can indicate whether the relationship's tables are to be cached in memory. A static relationship is one whose data does not change frequently so is a good candidate for table caching. If the developer has indicated that the static relationship's tables can be cached, you can control whether to enable caching from System Manager. System Manager lists all static relationships in the folder labeled Static in the Relationships folder.

Note:
For information on how to design a static relationship so that its tables are cached in memory, see the Map Development Guide.

Steps for enabling Caching

Perform the following steps to enable relationship table caching for a static relationship:

  1. Expand the Relationships folder in System Manager.
  2. Expand the Static folder in the object browser to locate the static relationship whose tables you want to be cached.
  3. Right-click the static relationship to determine its current cached state. If the Cached option appears with no check mark to the left, caching for that relationship is currently disabled. Select Cached to enable caching.

When the Cached option appears with a check mark to the left, InterChange Server reads the relationship tables into memory the next time the run-time data is accessed.

Steps for disabling Caching

Perform the following steps to disable relationship table caching for a static relationship:

  1. Expand the Relationships folder in System Manager.
  2. Expand the Static folder in the object browser to locate the static relationship whose tables you do not want to be cached.
  3. Right-click the static relationship to determine its current cached state. If the Cached option appears with a check mark to the left, caching for that relationship is currently enabled. Select Cached to disable caching.

When the Cached option appears with no check mark to the left, InterChange Server reads run-time data from the tables in the relationship database.

Steps for reloading the Cached tables

Perform the following steps to tell InterChange Server to reread the relationship's tables into memory with the Reload feature:

  1. Expand the Relationships folder in System Manager.
  2. Expand the Static folder in the object browser to locate the static relationship whose tables you want to be reloaded.
  3. Right-click the static relationship to determine its current cached state. If the Cached option appears with a check mark to the left, caching for that relationship is currently enabled. Therefore, the Reload option is enabled.
  4. Select Reload to reload the static relationship's tables.

InterChange Server reloads the cached relationship tables by rereading the tables from the relationship database into memory. This option is useful when the static relationship's tables are updated directly in the database through SQL statements. To get the more current version of the tables into cache, select the Reload option.

Steps for tracing Cached tables

Perform the following steps to tell InterChange Server to log a trace message each time it loads and unloads relationship tables in memory:

  1. Edit the InterchangeSystem.cfg file.
  2. Set the RELATIONSHIP.CACHING configuration parameter to five (5) in the TRACING section:
    RELATIONSHIP.CACHING=5
    

    InterChange Server Express routes these messages to the trace file (if one is configured). By default, InterChange Server Express does not generate trace messages when it loads and unloads the relationship tables. Trace levels less than five (0-4) do not produce messages either.

Copyright IBM Corp. 2004