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.

TIBCO Business Studio™ - BPM Edition provides a tool, Business Object Modeler, that allows you to build up a description of the business data that the process will manipulate. You can interact with business data (any BOM-based data) from any activity in a Process (for example, a user task, script task, and so on). 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 - BPM Edition Modelling Processes Guide.

Note: TIBCO Business Studio™ - BPM Edition supports two sorts of business data - normal business data and case data. This guide describes the use of normal business data. Additional information about case data is provided in the TIBCO Business Studio - BPM Edition Case Data User's Guide.

Case Data Manager (CDM) is the component responsible for handling business data in TIBCO BPM Enterprise.

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, then return to this section. One of the best ways to understand these concepts is to learn by example.