First of all, I would like to inform that I will be presenting a session on "Customizing Mobile Applications for Laptop" at SDN Day, Amsterdam on October 17th (check out the SDN Day Sessions in Amsterdam October 17). I will also be doing a 2 hour lecture session at SAP TechEd Bangalore (check out the session details and details about Bangalore TechEd 2006). Hope to see you there.
Now we move on to the topic of the blog - Anchors. Anchors, or Connectors as they are known in the Tile level, are used to connect the Business Logic Layer and the User Interface Layer. An Anchor can be either bound or unbound. A bound anchor has an underlying Data Source which can be a Business Object, Business Collection or a Business Query. An unbound anchor does not have an underlying data source.
All Controls in the tile should be present under an anchor. Unbound controls (like buttons etc.) will be present under an unbound anchor and bound controls (like text boxes, dropdowns etc.) will be present under a bound anchor. The data source for the bound controls can be either a Business Object Property, Business Collection Property or a Business Query Property depending on the data source of the bound anchor.
If a Tile displays data from more than one Business Object (which are related to each other), there can be more than one bound anchor in a tile. The bound anchors should be related to each other either by a Business Object Relation or by a Supply Function.
Anchors at the tileset level link data cross the different tiles in the tileset. This can be done through Business Anchor Mapping or Business Anchor Hierarchy.
Business Anchor Mapping maps the business anchor of one interaction component to the business anchor of other interaction component. The mapped anchors have the same underlying Business Object. This is mainly used in List/Detail tileset (a tileset which has List and Detail tiles with content of the Detail tile dependent on the selection in List tile). Business Anchor Hierarchy is used to display related data. The underlying Business Objects of the anchors can be related through Relationships, Supply Method or Query Result. This is mainly used in Detail/List tileset(a tileset which has Detail and List tiles with content of the List tile dependent on the data displayed in Detail Tile).
Anchors at the Business Component level links data across the Tilesets which are part of the Business Component. Business Anchor Mapping and Business Anchor Hierarchy concepts remain the same as in Tileset. Business Anchor Mapping is widely used.
I will be covering some more technical details of the Mobile Application Framework used for developing Applications for Laptop in my future blogs. These will act as a foundation for customizing Mobile applications. I will also blog on the topics requested by a lot of SDNers. Hope to meet a lot of fellow SDNers at the TechEds in Amsterdam and Bangalore.
