Business Object & Data Mapping

Business Object (BO) is an encapsulation of the business data or variables used by the different activities in a business process. Each business object can contain other business objects or parameters. Parameter is a simple data type which is same as the data type in common programming language. Process Designer (PD) supports 5 different data types - String, Integer, Decimal, Date and Time. The relationship between the business object and parameter is shown in figure below:

Fig. below describes an Employee Business Object which consists of 3 parameters - firstname, lastname and age. Furthermore, there is a business object in Employee that is Address which in turn consists of 3 parameters - houseNo, street and province.

Business object is one of most important PD components which is used to define input and output variables for each activity node task and for the process as a whole. The parameters of a BO are also used to create the condition of gateway tasks. The screen to define BO is shown in the figure below:

Data Mapping is the process of transmitting the business data via business object into each activity node task in order to operate the activity node task according to the data input. As a first step, the user has to define which business object of business process will be the input and output as shown in the figure below.

Then the user has to map between the business object of business process and defined business object of each activity node task. User can either map the entire business object to another business object or can map via parameter by parameter. Below example shows one business object to another business object mapping.

On the mapping link (shown as blue line in fig above) between the business objects, user can also add any condition as shown in the figure below. Double click on the link to open the Formula Editor.

For more details on Formula Editor please refer Formula Editor section.