Entity Naming Conventions

Most of the ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks named entities are modeled as NCNames (or as a subset of an NCNames). These include activity names, service names, reference names, binding names, and component names.

Process names and shared resource names are represented as a subset of an NCName as they do not allow the use of a dot (.) character in their names. A small set of named entities are modeled as OSGi symbolic names. This set includes application names, module names, process package names, and shared resource package names.

NCName stands for XML "non-colonized" name. See http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#NCName for the W3C definition of NCName. NCName represents the set of characters that conforms to the following restrictions:
  • Can include letters or numbers A-Z, a-z (lower case letters), 0-9, -, _ (underscore)
  • Cannot include the following characters: @, :, $, %, &, /, +, ,, ;, ), A-Z (uppercase letters), - (hyphen) and white space characters.
  • Cannot begin with a number, dot (.), or minus (-) character. However, these characters can appear later in an NCName.
The OSGi symbolic name is defined as part of the OSGi Specification, which is available at http://www.osgi.org/download/r5/osgi.core-5.0.0.pdf. OSGi symbolic names are represented using the following syntax: 
symbolic-name ::= token('.'token)*
token ::= ( alphanum | ’_’ | ’-’ )+ 
alphanum ::= alpha | digit
digit ::= [0..9]
alpha ::= [a..zA..Z]