Principles
About this task
A Smart View is a customized, business-oriented view of a data record in the MDM Hub.
A Smart View basically renders an HTML presentation of the details of a data record held in a specific entity. Whenever a business user tries to browse a data record through Talend MDM Web UI, Talend MDM checks for a Smart View for such entity. If it finds the Smart View, it uses this view to render the HTML presentation of the record detail instead of displaying the "conventional" generated form. The business user can then switch back and forth between the Smart View presentation and the generated form.
A Smart View is not a view but an XSLT-based process that must have an XSLT step which transforms the XML document using XSLT. The pipeline for this XSLT step must have an output variable called html. However, a Smart View can have steps other than the XSLT one that can perform different tasks on master data, for further information, see Processes.
A Smart View has a naming convention: Smart_view_<Entity>[_<ISO2>][<#name>]. The two characters country ISO code is optional and it allows you to define multilingual smart views. The <#name> suffix is also optional and allows you to define several smart views for the same entity.
At runtime, when a user tries to open a record in an entity through Talend MDM Web UI, say the Product entity for example, here is what happens:
Procedure
- Talend MDM first looks for all Processes that begins with Smart_view_Product,
- If it finds one with the _<ISO2> suffix (e.g. Smart_view_Product_ENU in the U.S., Smart_view_Product_FR in France etc.) it uses it,
- It then sends the XML record into the _DEFAULT_ variable and executes the Process,
- When the Process completes, it looks for an output variable called html,
- It finally sends the content of the html variable back to the browser.