Data manipulation APIs for ERP systems

Efficiency in data manipulation is of vital importance to ERP systems. A Flexible data manipulation application programming interface (API) helps to address a number of acute needs of application developers and eventually end users. Building on the notions of business objects and Web services, this paper contributes the design and implementation of a business object query language (BOQL). Essentially, BOQL provides query-like service invocation API that on-the-fly orchestrate CRUD-operations of business objects in an ERP system. BOQL allows to achieve the desired level of data manipulation flexibility at a reasonable price. In order to improve the performance of BOQL queries they can be compiled. To demonstrate the feasibility of the suggested approach this paper presents three use cases for BOQL: composite application development, navigation in ERP data, and user interface configuration.