Data manipulation API in ERP systems

Efficiency in data manipulation is of vital importance to ERP systems. Flexible data manipulation API helps to address a number of acute needs of end users and application developers. To be efficient the API must meet a number of requirements: (i) allow data operations at any granularity level, (ii) guarantee data integrity, (iii) be scalable, (iv) allow cross-platform invocations, (v) be convenient to use. None of the ERP systems exposes an API like that. Building on the notions of business objects and Web services, this paper contributes with the concept of a business object query language (BOQL). Essentially, BOQL is a query-like service invocation, which provides on-the-fly orchestration of CRUD-operations of business objects. BOQL allows to achieve the desired level of data manipulation efficiency at a reasonable price. To demonstrate the efficiency of the suggested approach the paper presents a use case showing how BOQL enables the development of composite