Custom buttons can provide users with on-demand, real-time access to specialized data services. Custom buttons can be added to Merge Manager and Hierarchy Manager.

Custom buttons can give users the ability to invoke a particular external service (such as retrieving data or computing results), perform a specialized operation (such as launching a workflow), and other tasks. Custom buttons can be designed to access data services by a wide range of service providers, including—but not limited to—enterprise applications (such as CRM or ERP applications), external service providers (such as foreign exchange calculators, publishers of financial market indexes, or government agencies), and even Informatica MDM Hub itself (for more information, see the

Multidomain MDM Services Integration Framework Guide

).

For example, you could add a custom button that invokes a specialized cleanse function, offered as a Web service by a vendor, that cleanses data in the customer record that is currently selected in the Merge Manager screen. When the user clicks the button, the underlying code would capture the relevant data from the selected record, create a request (possibly including authentication information) in the format expected by the Web service, and then submit that request to the Web service for processing. When the results are returned, the Hub displays the information in a separate Swing dialog (if you created one and if you implemented this as a client custom function) with the customer rowid_object from Informatica MDM Hub.

Custom buttons are not installed by default, nor are they required for every Informatica MDM Hub implementation. For each custom button you need to implement a Java interface, package the implementation in a JAR file, and deploy it by running a command-line utility. To control the appearance of the custom button in the Hub Console, you can supply either text or an icon graphic in any Swing-compatible graphic format (such as JPG, PNG, or GIF).