Business Objects

Business Objects have a Name and a Description, and may also have attributes (if any have been defined and enabled). You can also define these relationships:

• Superordinate Business Object: This is a ordinary "is part of"-relationship, as used in other Building Blocks, e.g. the Business Object Address Data is a subobject of the Business Object Customer Data.

• Specialises Business Object: This is a specialisation relationship, for example:
  • The business object Customer USA specialises the business object Customer; vice versa, Customer is a generalisation of Customer USA;
  • The Information System-specific Business Object (information object) Customer Data CRM specialises the Business Object Customer.

You can modify the Business Objects in Edit mode, which can be activated by clicking the Edit button. After making your changes, you can save them permanently by clicking Save, or click Cancel to discard without saving. Deleting a Business Object has the effect of deleting its entire substructure. The specialised Business Objects are retained, but the relationships which these objects have with the deleted object are deleted.

For more information about copying a Business Object see Copying a Building Block.

Page for editing Business Objects

Attributable Association: Information System Release to Business Object

The relation between Information System Releases and Business Objects can get attributes. To activate this option, at least one attribute type needs the "Relation between information system and business object"-type in the "activated for the following Building Block Types"-field. How to create or edit attributes is described here: Building Block Attributes. Next time, you refresh a Information System or a Business Object page, you will see attributes in the "Used by the following Information Systems" or "assigned Business Objects" table, corresponding to the Building Block. In edit mode, values for these attributes can be edited.

For example, making the complexity attribute for the "Relation between information system and business object"-Building Block Type available and hit refresh in the element itself. After that we will set some values for the attribute type in "Account-Sys RB # 3.1". Now, the "assigned Business Objects" for this Business Object, looks like this:

Viewing the Account-Sys RB # 3.1 after adding attributes

As you can see, the attribute name (Complexity) appears in header, and for every relation, e.g. "Account-Sys RB # 3.1 to Account statement", a value can be chosen. The same value for Complexity can be found (and edited) on the other side: Business Object in "Used by the following Information Systems". There is a row with "Account-Sys RB # 3.1" and it's description, and also the common Complexity value.