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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |