Patent ID: 7987159

Claim:
A method for detecting and managing changes in a business data integration (BDI) solution, comprising: detecting one or more changes in a BDI solution wherein the BDI solution comprises extracting, mapping, or loading source information from disparate sources as one or more targets presented to one or more source-independent business applications that consume the targets; classifying each of the changes based on change severity; analyzing what objects would be impacted by the changes; determining whether the objects impacted by the changes can be change handled without user intervention; change handling without user intervention all the objects impacted by changes that are not severe; launching a user interface for each change handler associated with a change, wherein the user interface is de-coupled from any logic that generates integration services packages and wherein the user interface comprises: a source of impact box showing a selected source from among the disparate sources; a change description box showing changes to the selected source; an impacted items box showing the objects impacted by the selected source; a guidance link showing a plurality of actions to correctly handle the change for the selected source in the source of impact box; and a button for automatically utilizing a computer-suggested way of handling the change; committing the changes to a metadata repository; and creating a deployable checkpoint of the metadata repository wherein the deployable checkpoint is consistent for all the changes handled in the BDI solution; wherein modularized metadata stored in the metadata repository describes an end to end information flow and underlying dependencies between the source information, mappings, the targets and the source-independent business applications.