Business Objects as Carriers of Data

Business object, data carrier, concepts

In Aware IM the world of data management application consists of business objects. Business objects encapsulate the data that needs to be entered, retrieved, edited and processed.

In fact, there is no data in an Aware IM-configured system that exists outside of some business object.

In a way this model very closely reflects the real world. Business objects exist in every business - customers, accounts, orders, payments etc. The data that a business object encapsulates is represented as attributes of a business object. For example, an order may have the placement date, customer, line items, shipment address, shipment date, shipment number, delivery instructions, order status, etc.

Attributes of a business object may be of different types – text, number, date, document etc (see Adding/Editing Attributes for a complete list of attribute types).

One of the most important attribute types is a reference attribute type. Reference attribute type (or simply reference) reflects the fact that business objects may be linked with other related objects. For example, an order may be linked to its order line items. References are explained in detail in the Reference Attributes section.

Given that business objects encapsulate the data in a data management application, the main aspects of the system related to data entry, storage, retrieval and processing boil down to the following:

Data entry is the process of entering of the attributes values of some business object
Data storage is the storage of attribute values
Data retrieval is finding instances of business object(s) that match a certain criteria
Data editing is the process of changing values of of a business object’s attributes
Data processing is using attribute values of business objects to create instances of other business objects and/or modify the existing attribute values.

note

In the Configuration Mode one can configure definitions of business objects and their attributes. In the Operation Mode one can create actual objects filling their attributes with specific data and linking them with other objects. While there is a single definition describing a business object in the Configuration Mode, there may be many instances in the Operation Mode representing the same business object. For example, you can configure a Customer object and then create many instances of a Customer objects in the Operation Mode, each representing a different customer. A formal way of making the distinction between objects in the two modes is to refer to the configuration-mode object as object definition and to the operation-mode objects as object instances. This document uses the formal notation when it is necessary to avoid confusion between the two modes. When it is clear which mode is being described, the term object is used.

Configuration of business objects is described in detail in the Adding/Editing Business Objects section.