| As a general rule, DataRep indicates the level of detail provided for the object hosting this attribute. It is intended for "data replication" applications that use full and sparse updates to communicate changes in data. What a receiving application does with this information depends on the application and the receiver's relationship with the sender. For example, if the receiving application has sufficient "trust" in the sender, the receiver may respond to a "Full" update (see below) by doing a wholesale delete of its current object and replacing it with the new object. Alternatively, the receiver may have reason to believe that its information is more correct and do little-more than print a report of the differences. In a few transactions, DataRep is used to indicate a specific action to be taken by the receiver of the transaction. This practice is now discouraged but documented below for those few occurrences that remain. Please refer to the Help File transaction documentation in Section 6 for transaction-specific information. "Full" (the default value) indicates that the sender is providing all known information that the receiver is permitted to view. For transactions that rely on DataRep, "Full" indicates that an Add or Update of the object is requested. "Partial" is used to indicate that the sender is providing an update of all properties and objects that have changed for this object since the last time it was transmitted to the receiver. It assumes that the object has been previously communicated to the receiver. It should be noted however, that each object has fields that are required for entity recognition. These fields must be transmitted on "Partial" objects and cannot change. That is, they cannot be different from values previously communicated to the receiver. If any of these fields change, the sender must indicate it by sending a "Removed" object followed by a "Full" replacement. Finally, if there are no defined Entity Recognition fields for an object, the object's "key" field must be used. (This last rule applies to "Removed" objects as well.) For transactions that rely on DataRep, "Partial" indicates that the sender would like the receiver to update the object with the information provided. "Removed" is used to indicate that the sender has deleted the object from the sender's records. It assumes that the object has been previously communicated to the receiver. At a minimum, the sender must supply the fields on the object required for entity recognition. All other elements are not used or valued by the receiver. For transactions that rely on DataRep, "Removed" indicates that the sender is requesting that the receiver delete the object. "ReadOnly" is used exclusively for those few transactions that rely on DataRep to indicate an action to be taken by the receiver. In this case, DataRep of "ReadOnly" indicates that no action, update or processing should be taken on this object. The object was transmitted for purposes of referential integrity. |