Administering the relationship service

The relationship service maintains relationships and roles in the system. It manages relationship and role definitions and metadata and enables the need to specify the definition of a relationship and manipulate the instances derived from the definition.

Relationships correlate identifiers from different environments for the same data. Participants in the relationship are distinguished by the roles they serve in the relationship.

Relationships and roles are described in definitions that you design through the graphical interface of WebSphere Integration Developer's relationship editor tool. The relationship definition is a template that describes what the relationship should look like, identifies each role, and specifies how the roles are related. The role definition captures the structure and constraint requirements for the participants. Each relationship definition has, as its constituents, role definitions. Relationship definitions are stored as XML files that are deployed as part of a J2EE application to a particular server.

For detailed background and task information on creating relationships, relationship types, and using the relationship editor, see the WebSphere Integration Developer Information Center.

At run time, when maps or other WebSphere Process Server components run and need a relationship instance, the instances of the relationships are either created or retrieved depending on the scenario. To facilitate the need to create and manipulate the relationship and role runtime instance data, the relationship service exposes a set of application programming interfaces (API's) to WebSphere Process Server's relationship manager tool. You interact with the relationships and roles through the relationship manager graphical interface.

The relationship and role instance data is saved in relationship tables that are stored on a specific server in the default data source that you specify when you configure the relationship service.

The relationship service runs on each server at the cell level. The Relationship Manager home page About section shows the number of servers in the cell that are running relationship services; the Relationships section shows each server name that is running relationship services. Before working with relationship instances, you need to select the server that has the instances of the relationships and roles you want to manage.

For detailed information on using the relationship manager, see the relationship manager and the administrative console in the WebSphere Process Server Information Center.

The following topics describe the configuration tasks to perform for the relationship services for your WebSphere Process Server environment.


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Last updated: Tue Feb 21 17:19:14 2006

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