Setting up annotations to attributes

Before you begin

You have already created business entities and attributes in the data model. For further information, see Creating business entities in a data model and Adding attributes to the business entity.

About this task

The data model editor makes it very easy to add specific annotations to any attribute within the business entity.

Through annotations, you can define authorization of roles regarding web interface access to attributes. You can also define display issues related to language specific labels, foreign and primary keys, multilingual description, and more.

The below table describes the annotations you can add to attributes within business entities.

Option	Description
Set the Descriptions	To have multilingual descriptions for different attributes in business entities.
Set the Labels	To have labels in different languages for any attribute within a business entity in the data model.
Set the Foreign Key	To link one attribute to another attribute or to a business entity. For further information, see Adding a foreign key: linking entities together. Information noteNote: A Primary Key can be an `integer` but a Foreign key must always be a `string`. The server surrounds Foreign Keys with square brackets to support compound keys. Foreign keys are only applicable to elements of simple type.
Set the Foreign Key Filter	To filter foreign keys by values extracted from the current record through using the standard xpath predicate of the relevant element. For further information, see Adding a foreign key filter.
Set the Foreign Key Infos	To display the data related to the foreign key. For more information, see Setting the display format of the foreign key information.
Set the Roles with Write Access	To grant one or several roles a Write access to the selected entity. For further information, see Defining access control at the attribute level (access control annotation).
Set the Roles with No Access	To deny access to the selected attribute for one or several roles.
Set the Visible Rule	To define whether to hide/show the selected attribute from a data record in Talend MDM Web UI .
Set the Default Value Rule	To define a default value of the selected attribute in order to display it automatically when a business user creates a new record through Talend MDM Web UI. For more information, see Setting a default value rule for an element.
Set the Facet Message	To set multilingual facet error messages.
Set the display format	To decide the format according to which you want to display/insert, in a specific language, dates or numbers in master data records in Talend MDM Web UI. To define the date/number format, you must use a syntax that is based on the `java.util.Formatter` class. For further information on this class, see Oracle documentation. For an example on how to set the display format, see Setting the display format of dates and numbers.

When you add any of the above annotation to an attribute in a business entity, an Annotations node is added to the attribute in the Data Model Entities panel. This node lists all the annotations added to the selected attribute.

To set up an annotation to any of the attributes you create in a business entity, do the following:

Procedure

In the Data Model Entities panel, right-click the attribute to which you want to add the annotation.
In the contextual menu, select the annotation you want to apply to the selected attribute.

A dialog box corresponding to the annotation option you have selected is displayed.

For example, if you select Set the Labels to have labels in different languages for a selected attribute, the following dialog box pops up.
From the list to the left, select a language and then enter a label in the field to the right.
Click the icon in the upper right corner to add the defined label to the Language/Label list and then click OK to validate your changes and close the dialog box.
The set annotation is displayed under the selected attribute.
Click the save icon on the toolbar or press Ctrl + S on your keyboard to save your modifications.

Results

Detail examples about how to Set the Role with Write Access annotation are given in Defining access control at the attribute level (access control annotation).

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