The present application claims benefit of priority from China Patent Application 201310258262.3, filed on Jun. 26, 2013. The content of that application is incorporated by reference herein.
1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to data processing. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a method, system, and computer program product for integrating data between differing enterprise systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, there are various approaches for reducing difficulty in data integration between different systems. Most data integration tools have enterprise metadata discovery mechanisms that to map enterprise data into an XML format for presentation in a tree structure. These tools traditionally require a user perform data mapping between data of such tree structures, including dragging lines between associated data fields and writing logic processing methods. Furthermore, the integration approaches of the prior art require an integration developer individually read a great number of documents of each enterprise system in order to understand meanings of each field in enterprise data of each enterprise system so that the integration developer may establish a field mapping relationship between the different systems. This is a time consuming and error prone process.
Disclosed is a method, system, and computer program product for integrating data between different enterprise systems. In a first aspect of the present disclosure there is provide a method, comprising: acquiring user interface metadata corresponding to data of each enterprise system. The user interface metadata describes how to data of each enterprise system should be presented on a user interface of that enterprise system. The method further comprises generating a user interface presentation corresponding to each enterprise system according to the respective user interface metadata of that enterprise system, and establishing, for each enterprise system, a mapping between the user interface presentation of each enterprise system and a structure of data.
According to another aspect of the present disclosure, there is provided a system for integrating data between different systems. The system comprises a first acquiring module that acquires user interface metadata corresponding to data of each enterprise. The user interface metadata describes how to data of each enterprise system should be presented on a user interface of that enterprise system. The system further comprises: a first generating module that generates a user interface presentation corresponding to each enterprise system according to the respective user interface metadata of that enterprise system; and an establishing module that configured to establishes, for each enterprise system, a mapping between the user interface presentation of each enterprise system and a structure of data.
The present disclosure can be better understood by referring to the following description when read in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in which same or similar reference numerals are used to denote same or similar components. The drawings, together with the following detailed description, are included in the specification and form part thereof, and used to further illustrate by way of example preferred embodiments of the present disclosure and explain principles and advantages of the present disclosure.
Described herein is a method, system, and computer program product for integrating data between enterprise different systems. According to the illustrative embodiments provided herein, intuitive data integration may be achieved on a user interface of the system, such that the time spent by a developer learning or identifying field mapping relationships between different systems is significantly reduced. Although an illustrative implementation of one or more embodiments is provided below, the disclosed systems and/or methods may be implemented using any number of techniques. The present disclosure is not limited to the illustrative implementations, drawings, and techniques illustrated below, including the exemplary designs and implementations illustrated and described herein, but may be modified within the scope of the appended claims along with their full scope of equivalents.
As will be appreciated by one skilled in the art, aspects of the present disclosure may be embodied as a system, method, or computer program product. Accordingly, aspects of the present disclosure may take the form of an entirely hardware embodiment, an entirely software embodiment (including firmware, resident software, micro-code, etc.) or an embodiment combining software and hardware aspects that may all generally be referred to herein as a “circuit,” “module” or “system.” Furthermore, aspects of the present disclosure may take the form of a computer program product embodied in one or more computer readable medium(s) having computer readable program code embodied thereon for performing the various functions of the present disclosure. It will be understood by those skilled in the art that the apparatus that embodies a part or all of the present disclosure may be a general purpose device having at least one processing unit, a memory, and a software executing on the at least one processing unit that is further configured to provide a part or all of an embodiment of the disclosure.
Aspects of the present disclosure are described below with reference to flowchart illustrations and/or block diagrams of methods, apparatus (systems), and computer program products according to embodiments of the disclosure. It will be understood that each block of the flowchart illustrations and/or block diagrams, and combinations of blocks in the flowchart illustrations and/or block diagrams, can be implemented by computer program instructions. These computer program instructions may be provided to a processor of a general purpose computer, special purpose computer, or other programmable data processing apparatus to produce a machine, such that the instructions, which execute via the processor of the computer or other programmable data processing apparatus, to implement the functions/acts specified in the flowchart and/or block diagram block or blocks. These computer program instructions may also be stored in a computer readable medium that can direct a computer, other programmable data processing apparatus, or other devices to function in a particular manner, such that the instructions stored in the computer readable medium produce an article of manufacture including instructions which implement the function/act specified in the flowchart and/or block diagram block or blocks. The computer program instructions may also be loaded onto a computer, other programmable data processing apparatus, or other devices to cause a series of operational steps to be performed on the computer, other programmable apparatus, or other devices to produce a computer implemented process such that the instructions which execute on the computer or other programmable apparatus provide processes for implementing the functions/acts specified in the flowchart and/or block diagram block or blocks.
With reference now to
As shown in
Computer system/server 12 typically includes a variety of computer system readable media. Such media may be any available media that is accessible by computer system/server 12, and includes both volatile and non-volatile media, removable media, and non-removable media. System memory 28 can include computer readable media in the form of volatile memory, such as random access memory (RAM) 30, and/or cache memory 32. Computer system/server 12 may further include other removable/non-removable, volatile/non-volatile computer system storage media. Computer system/server 12 may further include storage system 34 for reading from and writing to a non-removable, non-volatile magnetic media (not shown and typically called a “hard drive”). Although not shown, a magnetic disk drive for reading from and writing to a removable, non-volatile magnetic disk (e.g., a “floppy disk”), and an optical disk drive for reading from or writing to a removable, non-volatile optical disk such as a CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, or other optical media may also be provided. In such instances, each can be connected to bus 18 by one or more data media interfaces. As will be further depicted and described below, system memory 28 may include at least one program product having a set (e.g., at least one) of program modules that are configured to carry out the functions of embodiments of the present disclosure. Program/utility 40 comprises a set (at least one) of program modules 42 that may be stored in system memory 28. Program/utility 40 may also include an operating system(s), one or more application programs, other program modules, and program data, each of which may include an implementation of a networking environment. In one embodiment, program modules 42 may carry out the functions and/or methodologies of the present disclosure as described herein.
Computer system/server 12 may also communicate with a display 24, one or more external devices 14 such as a keyboard, a pointing device, one or more devices that enable a user to interact with computer system/server 12, and/or any devices that enable computer system/server 12 to communicate with one or more other computing devices (e.g., a network card or a modem) via Input/Output (I/O) interfaces 22. Further still, computer system/server 12 may communicate with one or more networks such as a local area network (LAN), a general wide area network (WAN), and/or a public network (e.g., the Internet) via network adapter 20. As depicted, network adapter 20 communicates with the other components of computer system/server 12 via bus 18. In one embodiment computer system/server 12 may also include other components such as: microcode, device drivers, redundant processing units, external disk drive arrays, redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID) systems, tape drives, and data archival storage systems, etc.
In addition the computer system/server 12, as shown in
With reference now to
First acquiring module 202 of integrator system 200 is configured to acquire user interface metadata 222a of enterprise data 226a-n corresponding to each enterprise system. The user interface metadata 222a-n of a particular enterprise system 220a-n describes how the enterprise data 226a-n should be presented on a user interface of that particular enterprise system 220a-n. First generating module 204 of integrator system 200 is configured to generate a user interface presentation 212a-n for each respective enterprise system 220a-n according to each corresponding user interface metadata 222a-n. Establishing module 206 is configured to establish a mapping 214a-n between each user interface presentation 212a-n and a structure of the enterprise data 226a-n.
User interface metadata 222a-n may be stored in form of XML code, or in any other forms known in the art. Those skilled in the art may select any form to store user interface metadata 222a-n as needed. An example user interface metadata 222a-n in the XML code form is given below. It should be understood that, the following description is provided for illustrative purposes only and should not be construed as a limitation of the present disclosure. Additionally, while the below example provides an example of user interface metadata of two enterprise systems, it should be understood that the present disclosure is applicable to three or more enterprise systems, and accordingly to three or more corresponding sets of user interface metadata.
In this example it is assumed that there are two different enterprise systems—systems A and B. For system A, the user interface metadata of data UIA is stored in a file account.layout.xml, and its content is as follows.
For system B, the user interface metadata of data UIB is stored in a file user.layout.xml, and its content is as follows.
Each user interface presentation 212a-n may include any number of user interface units, such as: text input boxes, radio buttons, check boxes, and drop-down selection boxes. The user interface presentations 212a-n corresponding to each enterprise system 220a-n may be generated by reading and executing user interface metadata of data. For example, using the above example user interface metadata UIA for system A, by reading and executing user interface metadata UIA of data, the following can be acquired: (1) User interface element C_name: its type being “text”, its label being “Name”, (2) User interface element C_gen: its type being “radiobutton”, its label being “Gender”, and (3) User interface element C_bd: its type being “complex”, its label being “Birthday”, and having three sub-elements with type being “select”. In this example, a user interface element corresponding to type “text” is a text input box, user interface unit corresponding to type “radiobutton” is a radio button, and user interface unit corresponding to type “select” is a drop-down select box. The user interface presentation corresponding to the above data of system A is illustrated in
Similarly, using the above user interface metadata UIB of system B, for example, by reading and executing user interface metadata UIB, the following can be acquired: (1) User interface element username: its type being “text”, its label being “Name”, (2) User interface element usergender: its type being “radiobutton”, its label being “Gender”, and (3) User interface element userbirthday: its type being “text”, its label being “Birthday”. In this example, the user interface unit corresponding to type “text” is a text input box, and user interface being corresponding to type “radiobutton” is a radio button. User interface presentation corresponding to the above data of system B is illustrated in
Mapping 214a-n between user interface presentations 212a-n and a structure of the associated enterprise data 226a-n of each enterprise system 220a-n may be established by correlating user interface metadata 222a-n with the structure of enterprise data 226a-n. According to an embodiment of the disclosure, user interface metadata 222a-n and the structure of enterprise data 226a-n may be correlated via an element name, in order to establish the mapping 214a-n.
Using the above systems A and B as an example again, assuming that the structure of data is in an XML format, as for system A, data structure DSA of data is stored in a file account.xsd, and its content is as follows.
As for system B, data structure DSB of data is stored in a file user.xsd, and its content is as follows.
Thus, it can be seen that for system A, user interface metadata UTA and structure DSA of data may be correlated via element names “C_name”, “C_Gen”, and “C_bd”, so as to establish a mapping between the user interface presentation of system A and the structure of data. Similarly, as for system B, the mapping between the user interface presentation of system B and the structure of data may be established by correlating user interface metadata UIB of data and the structure DSB of data via element names.
According to an embodiment of the disclosure, integrator system 200 may further comprise a second acquiring module 208 and a second generating module 210. Second acquiring module 208 is configured to acquire structure metadata 224a-n corresponding to the enterprise data 226a-n of each enterprise system 220a-n. Structure metadata 224a-n describes a structure of a corresponding data enterprise data 226a-n. Second generating module 210 is configured to generate data structure presentation 216a-n corresponding to the respective structure metadata 224a-n of each enterprise system 220a-n.
According to an embodiment of the disclosure, establishing module 206 is further configured to establish a mapping 214a-n between the user interface presentation 212a-n and the data structure presentation 216a-n of each enterprise system 220a-n. In one embodiment of the disclosure, the data structure presentation 216a-n is a tree.
According to an embodiment of the disclosure, integrator system 200 may further comprises a receiving module (not shown) that is configured to receive user input which establishes correlation between data elements on a user interface presentation 212a-n corresponding to each enterprise system 220a-n. The receiving module may also be coupled with a correlation module (not shown) that is configured to establish a correlation between data elements on the data structure presentation 216a-n corresponding to each enterprise system 220a-n according to the mapping 214a-n between user interface presentation 212a-n and data structure presentation 216a-n of each enterprise system 220a-n.
According to an embodiment of the disclosure, a receiving module (not shown) may be configured to receive user input that establishes a correlation between data elements within the enterprise data 226a-n and the data structure presentation 216a-n for each enterprise system 220a-n. A correlation module (not shown) of integrator system 200 may also be configured to establish a correlation between data elements on user interface presentation 212a-n corresponding to each enterprise system 220a-n according to the mapping 214a-n between the user interface presentation 212a-n and the data structure presentation 216a-n for each enterprise system 220a-n.
With reference now to
With reference now to
According to an embodiment of the disclosure, the method for integrating data between different enterprise systems further comprises: acquiring structure metadata corresponding to each system, and generating a data structure presentation corresponding to each system according to the structure metadata of that respective enterprise system. The structure metadata may further be used to describe the structure of the data.
According to an embodiment of the disclosure, the step of establishing a mapping between a user interface presentation corresponding to each system and a respective structure of data further comprises establishing a mapping between a user interface presentation and a data structure presentation of each respective system. According to an embodiment of the disclosure, the data structure presentation is a tree.
According to an embodiment of the disclosure, the method for integrating data between different systems further comprises: receiving a user input which establishes correlation between data elements of the enterprise data on the user interface presentation corresponding to each system; and establishing a correlation between data elements on the data structure presentation of each system according to the mapping between the user interface presentation and the data structure presentation corresponding to each system.
According to an embodiment of the disclosure, the method for integrating data between different systems further comprises: receiving a user input which establishes a correlation between data elements of the enterprise data on a data structure presentation corresponding to each system; and establishing a correlation between data elements on a user interface presentation corresponding to each system according to the mapping between the user interface presentation and the data structure presentation corresponding to each system.
The flowchart and block diagrams in the figures illustrate the architecture, functionality, and operation of possible implementations of systems, methods and computer program products according to various embodiments of the present disclosure. In this regard, each block in the flowchart or block diagrams may represent a module, segment, or portion of code, which comprises one or more executable instructions for implementing the specified logical function(s). It should also be noted that, in some alternative implementations, the functions in the flowcharts may occur out of the order noted in the figures. For example, two blocks shown in succession may, in fact, be executed substantially concurrently, or the blocks may sometimes be executed in the reverse order, depending upon the specific functionality and implementation involved. It should also be noted that each block in the block diagrams and/or flowcharts and a combination of blocks in the block diagrams and/or flowcharts may be implemented by a dedicated hardware-based system for performing specified functions or operations or by a combination of dedicated hardware and computer instructions.
These computer program instructions may also be stored in any combination of one or more computer usable or computer readable medium(s) that are capable of directing a computer or other programmable data processing apparatus to function in a particular manner, such that the instructions stored in the computer usable or computer readable medium(s) produce an article of manufacture including instruction means which implement the functions/acts specified in the flowcharts and/or block diagrams described herein. Any combination of one or more computer readable medium(s) may be utilized. The computer readable medium may be a computer readable signal medium or a computer readable storage medium. A computer readable storage medium may be, for example, but not limited to, an electronic, magnetic, optical, electromagnetic, infrared, or semiconductor system, apparatus, or device, or any suitable combination of the foregoing. More specific examples (a non-exhaustive list) of the computer readable storage medium would include the following: a portable computer diskette, a hard disk, a random access memory (RAM), a read-only memory (ROM), an erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM or Flash memory), a portable compact disc read-only memory (CD-ROM), an optical storage device, a magnetic storage device, or any suitable combination of the foregoing. In the context of this document, a computer readable storage medium may be any tangible medium that can contain, or store a program for use by or in connection with an instruction execution system, apparatus, or device. Program code embodied on a computer readable medium may be transmitted using any appropriate medium, including but not limited to wireless, wireline, optical fiber cable, RF, etc., or any suitable combination of the foregoing.
A computer readable signal medium may include a propagated data signal with computer readable program code embodied therein, for example, in baseband or as part of a carrier wave. Such a propagated signal may take any of a variety of forms, including, but not limited to, electro-magnetic, optical, or any suitable combination thereof. A computer readable signal medium may be any computer readable medium that is not a computer readable storage medium and that can communicate, propagate, or transport a program for use by or in connection with an instruction execution system, apparatus, or device.
Computer program code for carrying out operations for aspects of the present disclosure may be written in any combination of one or more programming languages, including an object oriented programming language such as Java, Smalltalk, C++ or the like and conventional procedural programming languages, such as the “C” programming language or similar programming languages. The program code may execute entirely on the user's computer, partly on the user's computer, as a stand-alone software package, partly on the user's computer and partly on a remote computer or entirely on the remote computer or server. In the latter scenario, the remote computer may be connected to the user's computer through any type of network, including a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN), or the connection may be made to an external computer (for example, through the Internet using an Internet Service Provider).
The descriptions of the various embodiments of the present disclosure have been presented for purposes of illustration, but are not intended to be exhaustive or limited to the embodiments disclosed. Many modifications and variations will be apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art without departing from the scope and spirit of the described embodiments. The terminology used herein was chosen to best explain the principles of the embodiments, the practical application or technical improvement over technologies found in the marketplace, or to enable others of ordinary skill in the art to understand the embodiments disclosed herein.
Number | Date | Country | Kind |
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201310258262.3 | Jun 2013 | CN | national |