A business object is an entity within a
multi-tiered software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
...
application that works in conjunction with the
data access
Data access is a generic term referring to a process which has both an IT-specific meaning and other connotations involving access rights in a broader legal and/or political sense. In the former it typically refers to software and activities relat ...
and
business logic In computer software, business logic or domain logic is the part of the program that encodes the real-world business rules that determine how data can be created, stored, and changed. It is contrasted with the remainder of the software that might ...
layers to transport data.
For example, a "Manager" would be a ''business object'' where its attributes can be "Name", "Second name", "Age", "Area", "Country" and it could hold a ''1-n'' association with its employees (a collection of ''Employee'' instances).
Another example would be a concept like "Process" having "Identifier", "Name", "Start date", "End date" and "Kind" attributes and holding an association with the "Employee" (''the responsible'') that started it.
Function
Whereas a program may implement
classes, which typically end in objects managing or executing behaviours, a ''business object'' usually does nothing itself but holds a set of
instance variable
In class-based, object-oriented programming, an instance variable is a variable defined in a class (i.e. a member variable), for which each instantiated object of the class has a separate copy, or instance. An instance variable has similariti ...
s or
properties
Property is the ownership of land, resources, improvements or other tangible objects, or intellectual property.
Property may also refer to:
Mathematics
* Property (mathematics)
Philosophy and science
* Property (philosophy), in philosophy an ...
, also known as ''attributes'', and
associations with other business objects, weaving a map of objects representing the business relationships.
A
domain model
In software engineering, a domain model is a conceptual model of the domain that incorporates both behavior and data.Fowler, Martin. ''Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture''. Addison Wesley, 2003, p. 116. In ontology engineering, a do ...
where ''business objects'' do not have behaviour is called an
anemic domain model The anemic domain model is described as a programming anti-pattern where the domain objects contain little or no business logic like validations, calculations, rules, and so forth. The business logic is thus baked into the architecture of the progr ...
.
Business objects separate state from behaviour because they are communicated across the tiers in a multi-tiered system, while the real work of the application is done in the business tier and does not move across the tiers.
See also
*
*
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*
References
*Rockford Lhotka, Visual Basic 6.0 Business Objects,
*Rockford Lhotka, Expert C# Business Objects,
*Rockford Lhotka, Expert One-on-One Visual Basic .NET Business Objects,
External links
A definition of domain modelby
Martin FowlerAnemic Domain Modelby Martin Fowler
Programming constructs
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