Data Fragmentation

Data Fragmentation is a canonical message and service interface design approach that balances between the scope of information requirements and supporting data elements of the service with individual processing needs of different consumers. Rather than forcing all consumers of a service to always accept and process every element of the message or service response, the consumers can select which of the elements as data fragments (groups of elements) that they require. Consumers specify the required data fragments in the request message using filters. Filters are simple XML elements that have an allowable value of “true” (i.e., “on” or “yes”) and “false” (i.e., “off” or “no”). Each filter is mapped one-to-one with a data fragment (collection of data elements defined to a parent, complex type element) of the message. For each data fragment that is required by a service consumer, the value of the filter is set to “true” in the request message. Upon receiving the request message, the service unmarshals the filter elements and data values from the message, maps the request values to the service and data access object model, processes the request and acquires the data from the data at rest sources, and returns only the requested data elements in the reply message.