Environment Metadata Product Lines

Lawson uses the term "product line" to mean a repository of metadata (data that describes data) and actual data that is required to run Lawson.

Kinds of product lines

Lawson maintains two types of product lines, application and Environment.

An application product line is a complete repository of application metadata, including screen descriptions, tables, forms, fields, and rules files, required to run a Lawson application as well as the actual data that is updated through the applications. Application Product Line Components

Lawson customers can have more than one Environment instance running on the same hardware server. Multiple Environments run in parallel and are not aware of each other. This enables Lawson customers, for example, to run completely separate test, develop, or production Environments.

An Environment product line is a repository of data that the Lawson Environment needs. This data is stored in two product lines, GEN and LOGAN, which reside in a customer RDBMS.

A combination of the Environment product lines and one or more application product lines make up an instance of the Environment. The diagram that follows shows a simple example of a single application product line.

Illustration: Single Environment showing the included product lines

Contents of the GEN product line

The GEN product line contains what can be thought of as the intelligence of the Environment. The metadata that resides there controls a number of Lawson subsytems. Following is a brief list of the kinds of data it stores:

  • Information about batch jobs

  • Process definitions

  • Logic definitions for Environment programs

  • Metadata about tables and key fields that enable them to be accessed throughout the entire Lawson system

  • Error messages that can be used across the Lawson system

  • Some kinds of user information, including information about batch job user groups and printer groups

  • Language translation files

  • A GEN data dictionary for managing the Environment

  • Element data definitions

Contents of the LOGAN product line

In previous releases of Lawson, the LOGAN product line contained web user information that is now stored in the LDAP directory. In current releases, LOGAN contains some data required by web-based applications, including:

  • Lawson Portal bookmark information

  • Process Server data

  • Self-Service application data

  • Lawson Security auditing data