Entity

An entity represents an object that is being referenced, such as a customer. An entity contains the information necessary to retrieve or identify the object.

Entities are composed of one or more attributes. Entities are created and grouped logically in applications. Once created, entities are placed in relationships to form participants.

An entity represents a complete key to the object. This is the case whether the entity contains one or many attributes, and whether those attributes are keys or values.

Configuration Tab

The Configuration tab contains the following fields.

Field Module Property? Description
Name No The name to be displayed as the label for the entity in the process.
Note: Only digits, alphanumeric characters, and underscores can be contained in the entity name. Besides, a digit cannot be used as the first character of the entity name.
Description No Add a short description for the entity.
TIBCO-Managed Entity No When selected, if you do not provide a value for the TIBCO-Managed Entity, BusinessWorks process generates a key for the added entity.

The Generate Key activity generates a key for a TIBCO-Managed entity. See Generate Key for more details.

Note: When you select the TIBCO-Managed Entity check box, the key schema has only one attribute ID, which must be a string of length less than 100 characters, as in id(100) .

Schema Tab

The Schema tab contains the following fields.

Field Module Property? Description
Name No The name of the attribute.

Some database implementations have reserved words, which cannot be used as column names and attributes. For example, if you are using Microsoft SQL Server, do not name an attribute key. If an attribute is a named key, an error is returned when synchronizing the schema.

Note: Only digits, alphanumeric characters, and underscores can be contained in the entity name. Besides, a digit cannot be used as the first character of the attribute name.
Type No Specify an attribute type, String or Integer .

The string length becomes the actual length in the database. Therefore, if you are using double-byte data, longer strings are required.

Length No Specify the maximum length of the key. This applies only to the String type.
Key No When selected, the attribute is part of the participant's key.
Is Required No When selected, the attribute is required of the entity.
Note:
  • This check box is displayed only when the Key check box is not selected.
  • When both Key and Is Required are not selected, the attribute is optional.