Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Getting Started:
OpenEdge Reference Architecture

Business Entities

A Business Entity is an object that encapsulates a logical view of data and provides one or more routines to perform actions related to the data contained within the object. Business Entities represent data from a business perspective, providing a logical view of data that might or might not relate to a database table on a one-to-one basis.

Business Entities implement the subjects (often called nouns) of an application. Nouns are objects that are created or acted upon. In a typical business application, nouns could include orders, customer profiles, inventories, and so on.

Properties of Business Entities

The properties of a Business Entity are typically used to provide context information that will be used during the creation and use of an instance of the entity. For example, an order business entity might contain an order number property that will be used throughout the life of the entity when used in the application. The order number property would be used for the gathering of all related data for that order, the population of new data as part of the ordering process, and so on.

By using a property, multiple instances of a single Business Entity Object could be created simultaneously, with each instance holding unique information. One instance of a Business Entity Object could have the order number property set to 1, while a second instance could be set to 2. Each instance would hold unique order information.

Routines of Business Entities

The routines of a Business Entity are typically used to perform actions on or in conjunction with the data contained within the entity. These routines will include both data manipulation (create, read, update, and delete) and the application of business rules relating to the data.