Building blocks

The Correspondence Management Solution contains three building blocks:

  • Asset Composer building block

  • Data Dictionary building block

  • Expression Manager building block

Building blocks are product capabilities with clear technical documentation that explains how they can be used for production applications. The building blocks are fully supported under the Platinum Enterprise support program.

Asset Composer building block

The Asset Composer building block provides APIs to create, update, and delete assets and render a document or dynamic form based on complex data-driven expressions (rules). The Asset Composer building block also provides user interfaces for users to author correspondence assets and to create custom correspondence. The Asset Composer building block leverages the Expression Manager building block to evaluate the necessary content (such as text and images) required for inclusion or exclusion to generate a personalized correspondence.

The Asset Composer building block consists of the following user interfaces:

  • Editor to create the letter templates

  • Editors to create text, lists, nested lists with compound numbering and dynamic lists with repeatable elements

  • User interface to upload images

  • Editor to create conditions

  • Editor to create and customize fragment layouts

  • Spell checker (in the text editor)

  • Editor to create categories and subcategories

  • User interface to upload layouts and fragment layouts

  • Create Correspondence user interface, using which business users can create custom correspondence

  • Manage Assets user interface, for performing create, update and delete operations on assets

Data Dictionary building block

An important feature of the Correspondence Management Solution is its ability to receive data from a backend data source as input for use in a customer correspondence. A data dictionary enables business users to use information from backend data sources without knowing technical details about their underlying data models.

A data dictionary is an independent representation of metadata that describes underlying data structures and their associated attributes. A data dictionary is created using business vocabulary. It can be mapped to one or more underlying data models.

The Data Dictionary building block consists of the following parts:

  • A user interface to create a data dictionary (either manually, or by importing XSD or another compliant data model) and to maintain it.

  • A server-side component that integrates with backend data sources and instantiates the data dictionary instance

  • Data Dictionary Browser user interface component which is used in various editors

Expression Manager building block

The Expression Manager building block performs computations on data values provided by the Data Dictionary building block or by end users.

The Correspondence Management Solution uses the result of the expression evaluation to select assets such as text, images, and templates. You can then use the Asset Composer building block to assemble the selected assets into a completed correspondence.

The Expression Manager building block consists of the following parts:
  • A server-side expression evaluation module provides the capability to evaluate expressions on the server side

  • A client-side expression evaluation module provides the capability to evaluate expressions in a Flex client application, without a server roundtrip

  • Expression Builder user interface component which is used to create, modify, and delete expressions

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