What's a busness object

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What is a business Object?

A general definition, from the Object Management Group:

A business object is a representation of a thing active in the business domain, including at least its business name and definition, attributes, behavior, relationships and constraints. A business object may represent, for example, a person, place or concept. The representation may be in a natural language, a modeling language, or a programming language.

An iMIS-specific definition, in terms of the Business Object Designer:

A business object is an iMIS system construct representing the data elements and business rules of a business concept like a contact; it is implemented using a combination of business rules, a schema definition that describes the data structures of the object’s properties, and a database view.

Elements of a Business Object

These are the basic elements of an iMIS business object.

■    Properties – attributes of the object (typically map to database columns). For example, Contact.LastName

■    Property constraints – logic that is executed whenever a property value changes. If constraint logic fails, the property value is not changed.  For example, LastName cannot be blank

■    Object constraints – logic that is executed whenever an object is created, modified, or deleted. If constraint logic fails, the attempted action is not committed. For example, If the contact gender is female, then the prefix cannot be Mr.

■    Actions – logic that is executed whenever an object is created, modified, or deleted. Actions do not pass or fail (unlike constraints), they just run. For example, When a company contact is set to inactive, set all company employees to inactive

■    Branches – used to provide inheritance-like functionality for similar objects – i.e., objects similar enough to be represented within a single object definition.