As you read some of my earlier post, its already known to you the TCA is an architecture that allows you to model and manage an electronic representation of the commercial community in which you do business.Trading Community Architecture (TCA) is literally an architecture designed to support complex trading communities which included in the TCA.Therefore in layman language this is:

• A comprehensive database schema.
• A set of public APIs for custom development.
• Integration with 3rd party content providers for data enrichment.
• A sophisticated set of data management utilities to keep the registry clean

The next question you might have how to get data Data Into TCA.

There are two ways recommended ^[1] for getting the data into the TCA data model.They are

• CRM and ERP/AR applications through Using the "Customer Interface Program".
• Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

Meeting Business Needs:

Programmatic access to the TCA Data model should go only if these are business needs:

• Applications in the Oracle E-Business Suite can use the TCA public APIs to insert and update entities in the TCA model, as part of server side and middle tier business logic.
• APIs provide a gateway to the TCA data model from applications that use Forms 6.0/9.0 user interfaces (UIs) as well as from HTML UIs.
• Data migration from legacy systems into the TCA model.

Important features of the Version 2 TCA API's:

• Flexible, easy to understand, and modular.
• Extensive debugging capability.
• Extensive error handling and reporting capability.
• Robust validation in all of the APIs.
• A ne locking mechanism based on the OBJECT_VERSION_NUMBER field,which has been included in all of the HZ entities for which the public APIs have been provided.
• Standard signature and availability of common parameters.

Categories of Entities Covered in TCA APIs:

The following are main categories of entities that are covered in TCA APIs :

• Parties - Person, Organization, Relationship, Group
• Locations, Party Sites, Party Site Uses
• Contact Points
• Customer Accounts, Account Sites and Site Uses
• Relationships
• Relationship, Relationship types
• Classification

APIs available for Trading Community Architecture:

Following are Some of the Important APIs Available for Trading Community Architecture.

• Party APIs:
  • Create Organization API
  • Create Person API
  • Create Group API
• Party Contact APIs:
  • Create Org Contact API
  • Update Org Contact API
• Location APIs:
  • Create Location API
  • Update Location API
• Party Site APIs:
  • Create Party Site API
  • Create Party Site Use API
• Contact Point APIs:
  • Create Contact Point API (Person or Organization)
• Relationship Type API:
  • Create Relationship Type API
• Relationship API:
  • Create Relationship API
• Customer Account APIs:
  • Create Customer Account API (Person or Organization)
  • Update Customer Account API
• Customer Account Site APIs:
  • Create Customer Account Site API
  • Create Customer Account Site Use API
• Customer Profile APIs:
  • Create Customer Profile API
  • Update Customer Profile API
• Classification API:
  • Create Class Category API
  • Create Code Assignment API
• Tax Assignment API:
  • Create Location Assignment API

You can check my old post for getting information for TCA tables structure ^[2] to see how data get populated.