Overview of business object structure

In the WebSphere business integration system, a business object definition consists of:

An application-specific business object definition is a particular type of a business object definition. It reflects a specific application's data structure and attribute properties.

Some attributes, instead of containing data, point to child business objects or arrays of child business objects. For instance, attributes may reference child WebSphere Business Integration business objects that represent relationships.

Business objects for adapters can be flat or hierarchical. A flat business object only contains simple attributes, that is, attributes that represent a single value (such as a string) and do not point to child business objects. A hierarchical business object contains both simple attributes and child business objects or arrays of child business objects.

Hierarchical business objects can contain child business objects that have single or multiple cardinality. The child objects are stored in their parents' attributes. Attributes that contain child business objects with multiple cardinality are arrays of business objects. Attributes that represent child business objects with single cardinality contain only one such object.

Copyright IBM Corp. 1997, 2004