From a given business component, it is possible to "walk along" the relationships defined for that component to another component. The path you use to traverse component relationships is called the navigation path. For example, you might want to obtain all addresses for a particular account. In this case, you can traverse the parent/child relationship between Account and Address to obtain those addresses. By using navigation paths, it is possible to traverse nearly all of the business component relationships defined in the Siebel system.

You can navigate from a top-level business component to any other related component. This defines the navigation path that will be taken to reach the selected component. All operations performed by the adapter will traverse this path prior to performing the selected operation. For example, if you want to select account addresses, select Account as the business object in the tree view. From there, navigate to the Address sub-component by expanding the Account view and selecting the Business Address Multi-Valued Link. By choosing this navigation path, you perform an operation on the Address component for a particular Account.

Because a business component represents all records in a particular database table, it is necessary to identify the particular record or records on which you want to perform an operation when moving down the navigation path. You accomplish this by specifying search criteria at each level of the navigation path. For example, you might want to select the addresses for the Account named Acct1. With the Siebel Adapter, you accomplish this by defining search expressions when you configure the adapter services for your integration.

Occasionally, to properly select the business component instances that will be affected by a given operation, you might need to specify constraints on business components that are not defined along the navigation path (for example, components that exist under the same business object as the selected component, but for which no explicit Multi-Valued Link field relationships exist). You can accomplish this by selecting additional business components under a selected business object. You then can specify search criteria constraints on these components. However, you should almost never need to specify additional business components to add the proper search criteria constraints to your operation. This option is provided for added flexibility. Typically, the use of the navigation path alone should be sufficient.