Design and Implementation of Tripyun Ctrip Cloud Metadata and SPU Management Platform

To address repeated system construction and low reusability, Ctrip launched a middle‑platform initiative, building Tripyun‑Ctrip Cloud as a product‑centered platform that enables business lines to publish, manage, and consume middle‑platform capabilities through a unified lifecycle.

Metadata is defined as structured information that describes resources; in the e‑commerce context, SPU (Standard Product Unit) aggregates product data, while category attributes describe product features. Tripyun uses SPU and category attributes to model products, orders, abilities, and teams.

The platform provides a flexible data model supporting various storage structures (key‑value, tables, cascades) and dynamic validation rules, enabling multi‑language reuse of attribute data.

For storing hierarchical category‑attribute trees in MySQL, four common methods are considered: Adjacency List, Path Enumeration, Nested Sets, and Closure Table. Although Closure Table offers fast full‑tree queries, the team chose the lightweight Adjacency List and compensated with a template‑generation layer and a message‑notification mechanism to keep attribute trees synchronized.

Dynamic business configuration is achieved through a "label" system that decouples extensible attributes from the SPU, allowing publishing‑subscribing of labels to specific business identities without altering the core data schema.

A rule engine (QLExpress) is integrated to replace hard‑coded if‑else logic, enabling non‑technical users to define validation and business rules, with support for versioning and preview.

A workflow engine is introduced to orchestrate complex business processes, providing extensible, context‑aware execution nodes that respect global business identities and support remote task delegation.

In summary, the middle‑platform abstracts business models into metadata, uses templated category‑attribute trees, label‑based dynamic extensions, and rule/workflow engines to achieve decoupled, reusable capabilities across Ctrip’s diverse business scenarios.