Business objects

A business object reflects a data entity--a collection of data treated as a unit. For example, a data entity can be equivalent to an employee record, containing all the basic information about the employee - the name, address, telephone number, employee number, position code, salary, and so forth.

The business integration system creates business objects that reflect the information contained in entities. In this book, a data entity is often referred to in the context of the kind of business information it contains--for example, an employee entity or a customer entity.

Business object definitions are the templates from which the application-specific component creates a particular instance of a business object.

This chapter introduces business objects in more detail and explains how they are used by the business integration system to carry data between applications. It includes the following sections:

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