Terms and Concepts

This section describes the following three Demand Management terms.

• Field Token

• Remote Reference

• URL Reference

For additional terms and concepts, refer to Demand Management User Guide.

Field Token

The Demand Management Web services identifies request fields with field tokens. A field token is a string with the following components and attributes:

• Alphanumeric characters

• Underscores (_)

• Always upper case

• Unique among all fields of the request type and request header type

When field tokens are used in a Web service operation, a prefix is required to indicate the source or type of the field. Valid prefixes include the following:

Prefix	Description	Example
REQ	Indicates the field is from a request header type.	REQ.DESCRIPTION
REQD	Indicates the field is from a request type.	REQD.TABLE_TOKEN
UD	Indicates the field is a user data field.	UD.CUST_FIELD
T	Indicates the field is a column of a table component field.	T. TABLE_TOKEN. COLUMN_TOKEN

Remote Reference

A remote reference refers to an item that exists on a remote system, which can be a PPM Server or another type of server.

Remote reference items appear in the Reference section of a request. A remote reference is only available for the Web service interface and cannot be created through the PPM standard interface. The purpose of the remote reference is to link a request or an item on an external system to a request in the current PPM system.

The following example illustrates a remote reference. The hyperlink attached to the name column is pointing to the remote system URL.

URL Reference

A URL reference refers to another type of item in the References section of a request. You can also create a URL reference by using the PPM standard interface.

The following example illustrates a URL reference. The hyperlink attached to the name column is pointing to the referred URL.

When you use the getRequests operation to obtain the content of a request, references of any type are converted to URL references. For more information, see the operation getRequests.