Business Data Services Glossary

Aggregation is a specialized form of association. Objects in an aggregation relation have their own lifecycle, but one object is related to the other object with a “has-a” type of relationship, for example, Department-Teacher.

Association is a relationship where all the objects have their own lifecycle and there is no parent. For example: the Teacher-Student relationship. This is the most general of the UML relationships.

A property of a Class, for example an Order class, may contain date and orderNumber attributes, amongst others.

The type of attribute can be one of the following:

• Primitive Type (see below)
• Enumerated Type (see below)
• Class Type (see below)

When choosing a type for an attribute, BOM Editor refers to the BOM Native Types as Primitive Types. Primitive Types which are not pre-defined, for example those that are defined within a BOM, have the package name of the BOM against them when selecting the Type to use. This can be useful, for instance, if there is more than one BOM that contains an OrderId class.

Process Template field values can be of a Basic Type or an External Reference Type that refers to a BOM Class.

The Basic Types are:

• Text
• Decimal
• Integer
• Boolean
• Date
• Time
• Date Time
• Performer

Note: There is no Datetimetz, Duration, BOM Object, URI, or ID type (nor an Attachment type), and the Performer field is a special type of Text field that contains an RQL query string.

The Basic Types are also known as Process Types.

Business Data Services

See Business Data Services.

Business Object Model

See Business Object Model (BOM).

An entity in the BOM that represents a particular part of the application data, for example, an Order or a Customer. A BOM Class is a template for a Business Object.

There are 13 predefined primitive types (or 15, if you count the numeric sub-types) that can be used to build other Primitive Types, or used as types of attributes of classes:

• Boolean, String
• Integer (Signed integer and Fixed integer sub-types)
• Decimal (Floating Point and Fixed Point sub-types)
• Date, Time, Datetime, Datetimetz, Duration
• URI, ID, Object, Attachment *

Note that the Attachment type is not currently supported.

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 objects will also be related to each other in different relationships and with different multiplicities.

An application in the ActiveMatrix BPM runtime that is created by deploying a Business Data project. A Business Data application contains the BDS Plug-ins generated from the BOM or BOMs in the Business Data project.)

A Component of ActiveMatrix BPM that handles all the application data needs of the ActiveMatrix BPM system.

An instance of a BOM Class. For example, for a Customer class, there is a Business Object that represents and holds information about a particular customer. Do not confuse this term with Object BOM Native Type.

The Model representing the structure of the application data created using the BOM editor. A BOM that contains only local classes is a local BOM. A BOM that contains at least one case or global class is a global BOM.

Composition is a specialized form of the Aggregation relationship. In this relationship if the parent object is deleted, all the child objects will be deleted too. This is not the case for Aggregation. An example of this type of relationship is School-Classroom. If the School is destroyed, the classrooms will be destroyed too.

Eclipse Modeling Framework.

See:

http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/emf/

A type that can have a restricted set of values. For example, DayOfWeek can have the following values:

SUNDAY, MONDAY, TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY, FRIDAY, SATURDAY

The Generalization relationship indicates that one of the two related classes (the subtype) is considered to be a specialized form of the other (the super type), and supertype is considered as a Generalization of the subtype. These types of relationships are characterized by the "is-a" phrase. For example, Oak "is-a" Tree. An Oak is a Specialization of the more general Tree class, and Tree is a generalization of the more specific Oak class.

A BOM that contains at least one case class or global class.

A BOM that contains only local classes. (A local BOM cannot contain a global class or a case class.)

In a BOM, it is possible to define a type based on one of the BOM Native Types or another Primitive Type. When these Primitive Types are defined, it is possible to add some limitations using a regular expression or a range.

Data Fields of Primitive Types cannot be used in processes. They must be of BOM Types or Basic Types.

An instance of a flow through a Process Template with data values that reflect the information being processed by this particular instance of the process.

Data that lives within a Process Instance. The object will either be a Business Object or a Basic Type.

The definition of what a process should do.

Basic Type.

See Basic Type.

Resource Query Language – a language for selecting which resources can have access to a UserTask in a process. For example:

resource(name="Clint Hill")

Generalization.

See Generalization.

Unified Modeling Language – an international standard modeling language supported by many tools. Identifies different types of relationships that can exist between the objects being modelled, for example: composition, generalization/specialization, association, and aggregation.

A UserTask is a step in a process that is handled by a user and requires the user to complete a form. On completing the form, the user submits the values causing the changes to the field values to be saved. A user may Close a form so that they can complete it later.

WSDL stands for Web Service Definition Language. A file with a .wsdl extension contains the definition of a Web Service, defining the format of the request and responses. A WSDL file can be imported by TIBCO Business Studio to make it easy to call web services.

XSD stands for XML Schema Definition. A file with a .xsd extension contains XML that defines the format that some other XML should take. This other XML is used to pass data between processes.