Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress Dynamics Getting Started

Object repository

The heart of Progress Dynamics is its object repository. The Progress Dynamics Repository consists of an OpenEdge database named icfdb whose schema is defined to store information about an OpenEdge application. This includes development and run-time information about the application that is completely separate from the data stored in your application database.

Progress Dynamics relies on the data you provide in the Repository to specify the user interface (UI), design- and run-time configuration, and other features of an OpenEdge application. It is the Repository, and the toolset that accesses it, that allows you to automatically generate many application objects based on the schema of an application database. Such objects are known as dynamic objects because their implementation is determined at run time using data stored for the object instance in the Repository.

While the main purpose of the Repository is to store the run-time properties for dynamic objects, it can also store references to static objects that you want to include in your application. Static objects are objects defined at compile time. These static objects can include Progress Dynamics versions of ADM objects or any other procedures that you include in your application.

In addition to application objects of various types, the Repository stores a variety of additional information about an application, including:

Configuration management data for both development and deployment.
User profile data for configuring the application to users’ preferences.
Automatic database auditing and comment information.
Customizeable sequence and reference number generation.
Security data.
Localization data.
Online help integration data.
Multi-media data.