Attributes define the structure for the data associated with the MBO instance on the mobile device.
Metadata describes the arguments that are passed to the back-end data source operations, which retrieve the data set for the MBO. Attributes correspond to the class-level properties on the mobile client object. Arguments are known as load parameters for the MBO, and can be optionally mapped to synchronization parameters for the mobile object. Default values are used when no argument values are sent from the device application, or if the argument need not be exposed to the device application. Arguments can also be bound to personalization keys to automatically populate individual user preferences.
Unwired Platform comprises both server-side and client-side components. Server-side components address the interaction between the enterprise information system (EIS) data source and the consolidated database (also referred to as the cache), while client-side components address the interaction between the consolidated database and the mobile device data store. Unwired Server brokers data synchronization and transaction processing between the server and the client.
Attributes define the scope of the device-side data store. Attributes and parameters in an MBO define the server cache. The server cache and device data store are populated by reading data from the EIS, such as a SQL select statement for a database data source.
Attributes also have additional metadata, such as specification of a synchronization parameter option that can be used to provision user-specific data. For example, a sales representative in the Eastern region may be interested only in seeing data for that region. Developers can build the application to map those preferences to MBOs to drive the data filtering specific to the user. The same data obtained from the EIS is then further partitioned and used to serve all users, thereby optimizing requests for data to the EIS and improving performance of the mobile application.