OpenEdge Getting Started:<br />OpenEdge Reference Architecture Business Tasks

Where Business Entity components are commonly considered the nouns of the Business Services Layer, Business Task components are often referred to as verbs. Verbs include actions such as creating, updating, canceling, and so on. So when you combine Business Entity components with Business Task components, you get processes like “creating an order,” “updating a customer profile,” and so on.

Business Tasks are reusable components that define and encapsulate a common business function. Business tasks expose the actions that should be performed relating to a particular function as one or more routines. These components utilize business entities (as needed) in order to manipulate data associated with a particular task.

Each Business Task should be able to manage the context of its actions without reliance on another object. A Business Task Object for order entry, for example, should be able to manage all actions and context related to order entry (including the manipulation of data and transactions) within itself. If context cannot be maintained, the Business Task is considered to be too large, and should be split into multiple Business Tasks.

Properties of Business Tasks

Much like Business Entities, properties of a Business Task are typically used to hold simple context information for an instance of a task. These properties can then be used as a form of identification for each instance at run time. For example, a Business Task could be designed to handle the creation of an order. One property might be created to hold an order ID. This property would allow the application to simultaneously deal with multiple order creations at once, with each business task object representing a different order.

Routines of Business Tasks

The routines of a Business Task define the actions that could occur in order to properly complete the task. Typical routines for a Business Task include the following:

CRUD activities — These routines, for creation, reading, updating and deleting data are similar to those found in Business Entities. The CRUD routines of a Business Task, however, can involve the use of more than one Business Entity and often involves more complex processing.

Complex business rules processing — In order to accomplish a business task, it is often necessary to perform application logic based upon business rules and domain expertise. This type of processing can be complex and intensive. Each of these sets of rules can be encapsulated into a Business Task routine, allowing them to occur when needed.

Business management and monitoring — Routines of a Business Task can include actions related to the overall management of the application. Routines of this type can include logging of information, security/permissions, and reporting.