Business Data Projects

Business Data projects are used to store business data models that can be referenced by process projects.

A Business Data project can contain either or both of the following types of Business Object Model (BOM):

  • Global BOM - a BOM that contains at least one case class or global class. A global BOM that contains a case class is also referred to as a case data model. You create a global BOM manually in the project's Business Objects folder.
  • Local BOM - a BOM that contains only local classes. You can create a local BOM in two ways:
    • You can create one manually in the project's Business Objects folder.
    • You can add a WSDL or XSD to the project's Service Descriptors special folder. When you do this, a local BOM representing the WSDL or XSD is automatically generated in the project's Generated Business Objects folder. An automatically generated local BOM is also referred to as a generated BOM.
    Note: When you manually create a BOM the Global Data tools are available in the palette in the BOM Editor. Global Data tools are not available for an automatically generated local BOM.

Best Practice

For best results, follow these guidelines when creating and using Business Data projects:

  • Keep local BOMs and WSDLs or XSDs (and their generated BOMs) in suitable Business Data projects, rather than in Analysis or BPM Developer projects. This:
    • makes it easier to organize and share local data among different processes. (Using a Business Data project, the local data only needs to be defined and deployed once. If you use an Analysis or BPM Development project - that is, the same project as a business process that uses the data - whenever that project is deployed or generated as a DAA, BDS Plug-ins corresponding to the referenced BOMs are packaged as part of the DAA. That is, every deployed process has its own copy of any local data it uses.)
    • provides better design-time performance, particularly for projects involving large numbers of local/generated BOMs (by avoiding unnecessary regeneration of BDS Plug-ins).
  • Keep local BOMs and global BOMs in separate Business Data projects, unless you have a compelling reason to keep them together. This is particularly important for application upgrade, as local and global BOMs have different compatibility requirements:
    • Local BOMs: You can still upgrade a Business Data project if a local BOM contains incompatible changes, but doing so could result in failure to migrate a dependent process instance to the upgraded version. See Process Migration.
    • Global BOMs: You cannot upgrade a Business Data project if a global BOM contains incompatible (that is, destructive) changes. See "Upgrading a Case Data Model" in the Case Data User's Guide.
  • If a process project references a class in a local or global BOM in a Business Data project, the version number of the Business Data project is used in the reference when the DAA for the process project is generated. This creates an exact-match dependency on the version number from the process application to that version of the BDS application. Consequently, when you upgrade a local BOM or a global BOM, you should also upgrade any existing process project that references that Business Data project - even if that process project makes no use of the updated parts of the BOM. Keeping BDS applications and dependent process applications in step in this way facilitates subsequent deployments or undeployments of either application.
  • Configure a project that contains generated BOMs to use pre-compilation, so that the BDS plugins derived from the BOMs are not generated each time that the project is built. Generated BOMs are often large and, being derived from WSDLs or XSDs, usually will not change very often, so using pre-compilation can significantly improve design-time performance. (To configure the project to use pre-compilation, right-click the project in Project Explorer and choose Pre-compile Project > Enable. See "Pre-Compiling Projects" in the TIBCO Business Studio Modeling Guide for more information about pre-compilation.)