The Merge Dictionary stores the entities and procedures that must be processed to merge party entities for any Oracle application. During the merge process, each procedure sequentially executes for the entities defined in the Dictionary. Merge programs use the information in the Merge Dictionary to recognize which entities to merge, and they recognize the foreign keys and procedures without the need to recompile or regenerate the application code.

Each Oracle application maintains its own tables to store the information required to complete its business functions. During a merge process, all registered applications must be able to access the data for the appropriate entity that is related to the TCA Registry. If a merge procedure attempts to access a deleted party, the transaction, attributes, and other information for the party cannot be merged.

To maintain how Oracle applications are affected by the merge process, you register the entities, for example Accounts, Organization Contacts, and Party Sites, foreign keys, and procedures for specific Oracle applications in the Merge Dictionary. See: Maintaining the Merge Dictionary.

For example, if your company enters into a service contract with one of the parties in your Registry, you would use Oracle Receivables to send invoices and statements to that party and Oracle Service to administer that service contract. If that party is acquired by another party, is identified as a duplicate of another party, or has sites that must be consolidated, you must merge those parties or party sites. This party merge affects customer accounts and attributes of the parties in Oracle Receivables, Oracle Service, and other Oracle Applications.

The registration specifies the names of the procedures required to merge the entities that interact with the party entities. These entities can be identified using the foreign key attributes that they contain. If any entity contains an attribute that is a foreign key to any of the TCA entities, these entities should be part of the Merge Dictionary and a procedure should be created to handle the records in this entity during the merge process.

Some Oracle Applications, along with their party entities, are automatically registered at installation. If you have installed any of these applications, when you perform a merge, the entities associated with the parties in these applications are merged as well. See: Party and Account Merge Impact, Oracle Trading Community Architecture Reference Guide.