Business Data

Business data is structured data that contains information about real-world entities that an organization deals with, for example Customer, Order, and Orderline.

Each of these entities will have a number of attributes, for example name, address, and date. These entities will also be related to each other in different relationships and with different multiplicities.

A fundamental part of developing a business process is to understand the data that the process manipulates and depends upon.

TIBCO Business Studio provides a tool, Business Object Modeler, that allows you to build up a description of the business data that the process will manipulate. The resulting Business Object Model (BOM) contains the different types of objects that the business uses, their attributes, and their relationships to each other. For more information on using Business Object Modeler, see TIBCO Business Studio Modeling User’s Guide.

Note: With the introduction of version 3.0, ActiveMatrix BPM supports two sorts of business data - normal (or local) business data, and case data. This guide describes the use of normal business data. Additional information about case data is provided in the TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM Case Data User's Guide.

Object Orientation

The BPM runtime is an Object Oriented (OO) system, as is the scripting environment that supports it. The topics in this Introduction describe important concepts that stem from the use of this OO design. It is important to understand these concepts to achieve the desired behavior when using scripts to manipulate business data.

Note: If you have difficulty understanding any of these concepts, refer to the examples described in Business Data Scripting by Example, then return to this section. One of the best ways to understand these concepts is to learn by example.