Entity Modeling - intro
OpenText Process Platform 10.8 is out for quite some time now, the next version (16) is about to be released and the key new 'ingredient' in these versions is Entity Modeling. So what is that? And what can you do with it? When you 'google' for the definition of Entity Modeling, you will find quite a few links. It first brings you to the definition of an 'Entity-relationship (ER) model: a data model for describing the data or information aspects of a business domain'. There is more in that first definition that is shown (Wikipedia), you can find it there yourself. Microsoft has another definition: 'describe the structure of data regardless of its stored form'. To learn a bit more about ER Models in general (not everything might be applicable) have a look here in Tutorialspoint. But before we do a deep dive into the 'what' and 'how', we first need to understand the 'why'. Why is Entity Modeling included in Process Platform, what good does it do for us? The idea behind Entity Modeling is that a relatively simple business problem should not require too many technical skills: with a good understanding of your business and using your common sense, you should be able to solve that as well. Goal is to make application development more simple. To do so it all starts with the application domain. Instead of starting with a set of predefined document types (e.g. case models, forms, web services), you start with the entity itself: that is the central place where the developer starts designing the application from. Once you have the Entity, you can add properties to it, define relations with other entities, set security on the entity and create e.g. a form to present all properties of an entity. With Entity Modeling it should be easier to create business applications. In the coming weeks I hope to learn a bit more about this and see how this radically changes the way we work in Process Platform, so more about the 'what' and 'how'. Will try to add some screenshots and perhaps a short movie in a next blog.
