SIEBEL:XML Hierarchy, Binary XML, XML Encoding and other usages in Siebel

A lot of people get confused with using terminologies like XML Hierarchy, Binary XML, Encoding in XML, XML Hierarchy etc. Siebel has a lot of functionality built on XML and uses vanilla business services for this purpose.

First of all, an XML document is just a valid XML. Data in any XML file can be considered as a XML document. A well formed XML is a standard to create and use XML documents. Now let us look at how siebel uses XML. 

XML is a transport language. We use XML to transfer data from one system to another in a well formed readable format. During Siebel EAI transactions, data is sent and received in XML formats. Consider this example where we send account information to external system from siebel.

I will call EAI Siebel Adapter BS, Query method to create an instance of Integration Object. The output is a property set of type SiebelMessage. It will have properties with Name as Integration Component field name. When I send this information to external system, it will send the xml name of the field. When external system sends data,it is an XML but when we receive it, it will be a property set message. We process the message using EAI Siebel Adapter service. 

As in the below example, if I have a field 'Integration Id' in IC, it will be the same in SiebelMessage but in XML, it will be IntegrationId.

An XML can be converted to Property Set or Siebel Message using EAI XML Converter business service. 

If I do a EAI Siebel Adapter query, we get property set output. If I convert the property set to an XML document using EAI XML converter, it gives XML as a string in output of type <Value>. 

If you look at above screenshot, the test case 1 is as output of EAI siebel adapter query method. I used it to convert the property set to XML Document (as seen in Value field) using EAI XML converter BS. I got test case 2 record as output. I used the XML document and converted it to XML Hierarchy which is again a property set with XML tags as properties.

I have exported the structure of data from BS simulator.

Siebel Message looks like this.

An XML Doc looks like this.

An XML Hierarchy looks like this.

Below table describes few differences of the terminology.

XML Encoding is a standard which we use to make sure that every character is unique. I can send special characters in an XML document. Every character should be understood by the receiving system. If I use English and the other person use French, we should be able to communicate with each other properly. For this, a standard called Unicode is in place. It has a unique code for each character in almost all the languages. This way, data transfer can occur without loss of meaning. 

Unicode is an industry standard for character encoding of text documents. It defines (nearly) every possible international character by a name and a number.

If you look at the below line, the attribute encoding denotes the type of Unicode used for encoding. UTF-8 is commonly used encoding. 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

Binary XML is an XML with encoded binary data. The text is converted to binary data and the XML is formed with the binary information. This makes the XML as not readable by humans. This has an added advantage of performance. I will cover this topic in another post.

Hope this explains the XML usage in Siebel terms.