value mapping or lookup?

[Former Member]

Which is recommended as a good development practice to maintain business value mapping in PI through Value Mapping or maintainin it in a table in ECC and performing RFC lookup?

I was looking for pros and cons for the both the approaches.

[Former Member]

Hi Vicky, besides value mapping and lookup, also have a look at SAP UKMS Unified Key Mapping Service, . I never saw it in action myself, but it's there

[ambrish_mishra]

Hi Vicky,

Martin has given a good option. I used UKMS in a project and it is a very good functionality for look up.

The client had even enhanced it with a Portal wrapper for business to directly maintain the values and there was a mass upload tool through a text file. So we could easily upload thousands of values within a minute.

Hope it helps!

Ambrish

[udo_martens]

Hi Vicky,

you can have both as well - with a value mapping replication. Handicap: this would be the most expensive solution. Advantages: Good to monitor, good runtime performance.

The best advantage from a lookup is the short development time. But it is difficult to monitor and can lead to performance bottlenecks (if you execute hundreds of lookups within a loop of a mapping).

Value mapping is very unfleksible but of course a very short development time. Not recommandable if you expect frequently changes.

/Udo

[Former Member]

Why is value mapping not recommended if we have frequent changes? We can make these changes directly in Integration Directory in production as and when new value maps are provided or the existing maps are changed.

Yes I do agree that one problem i see with value mapping is that for each pair of values a new group needs to be created. This may result in 1000 of Valume mapping groups in ID.

The other downside i see is that if I have the following conditions:

Situation 1

If input is apple return orange

              banana return banana

Situation 2

If input is apple return orange

              banana return orange         

[baskar_gopalakrishnan2]

I have seen mostly lookups than value mapping in many interfaces in my experience. When you design , you might not know about the volume of data at the beginning. If you need to have many lookup values and possibility for the further growth, don't proceed with value mapping.  I would personally prefer lookups always for the best maintanence.  Have it in a db table and do a simple jdbc lookup. Let somebody like dba to maintain the information.

[udo_martens]

Hi Vicky,

Why is value mapping not recommended if we have frequent changes?

Because your customer/your boss wants to avoid efforts by running the interface. And he dont want to pay for a PI developer filling a simple table.

/Udo

[Shabarish_Nair]

Depends. If it is something that changes and requires maintenance, it will be better to maintain it in ECC and do lookups.

For very static data and scenarios that require strict SLAs, it will be ideal to have it in PI.