Business Objects in BOP4

 

Introduction

Maintenance of Business Objects is required for most business processes.

MDM has an important role in enterprise data management and quality. It provides a “single point of truth” in the enterprise and allows connected  processes and service to use “the latest and greatest” and clean business data. MDM therefore is the preferred way to manage business data.

 

If MDM is not in place, and business objects are not maintained in backend-applications there are mainly two ways how to maintain and persist business objects:

1. A dedicated solution database
2. Object Templates

 

This blog will briefly zoom in into these options

 

Options

 

1: Dedicated database

 

This option can be compared to the traditional application development approach. From the logical data/object model a technical data model is developed. This model describes the database tables and the constraints like primary keys and relations. Based on this a database can be created, preferably separate from the Cordys database instance.

Cordys BOP4 provides the feature to query the metadata of a database, and to generate standard or customized web-services to access the database tabels. These web services should be deployed on a WS-AppServer container, before they can be used e.g. in XForms or BPM-s

 

Cordys allows developers to add business rules to these web servcies in order to perform additional validations and control the lifecycle of these business objects, represented by the database tables.

 

2. Object Templates

 

Object Templates are a construct that is offered by Cordys BOP4.

 

It allows to define data objects based on Schema fragments. The developer may specify constraints and validations, attach (execution-) rules en specify whether or not changes to the the object are subject to audits. Besides that it is possible to specify if the object should be persisted by Cordys. If that option is selected the instances of the Object Template will be stored inside the CoBOC database (the database used to store information about the BPM instances).

 

Object templates can be accessed using the following CoBOC WebServices:

 - UpdateXMLObject to insert, update or delete an object

 - GetObjectsByAttribute  to retrieve a object

 

Obviously these can could be embedded in a dedicated Webservice per separate Object

 

 

Best pick?

Both approaches above have pro-s and con-s. The "best" choice depends on project or architectural requirements:

 

Dedicated database

Pro-s

• Open database format (Data can be accessed easily from outside)
• More control on data (Separate database, custimizable WS services for data access)

Con-s

• Data layer should be maintained manually
• Separate WebServices are required

 

Object templates

Pro-s

• The data-tier remains hidden
• More productive because of less required steps and objects
• Audit possibilities

Con-s

• Cordys specific data format and Web Services to access data

• Data stored in CoBOC, so it may impact BPM execution performance

 

Depending on requirements (e.g. portability, testability, traceability, maintainability) one should decide on the way to go.

 

 Regards,

 

Harald van der weel