How To: Use Power of Properties (PoP), Part 4.1 - For Entity

Dear Friends,

Entity plays a major role while designing and developing applications on Wolf Platform because all the applications are entity oriented. You start building your application using an Entity. An Entity is similar to a real world "object" and has its own state, properties, data, screens and rules. Thus all the other elements revolve around ENTITY which is heart of any application.

For example, if you intend to build an application that collects information about Contact Details of people, an Entity called Contact Details may be defined to store the information for each person.

Today let us start with the properties of entity. We will be covering these in 3 parts, as it requires a thorough understanding of properties, so that there will be no more queries jumping in your head while developing your application and it will be developed in one go.

Figure 4.1: Properties for Entity

Entity Name: One needs a name to communicate with others. So it is a mandatory field here in Wolf too. You will use the name given here in property every time you refer to this Entity. For example, while using Business Rules.

Description: The Description provided will be used in the auto generated documentation. Describe about your entity here. What does it stand for, it will help you when you will have n number of entities in an application, you can just refer the description of the entities and find about which entity is being used for which functionality.

Figure 4.2: Category Property for Entity

Category: The categorization helps you organize your Entities. It also groups the main menu in your [Runtime] mode. So select the category from the dropdown to group the entities in a particular type of entities. For Example, an entity can be of general, report, specific, or any user defined category, as shown in figure 4.2. You can also define your own category for entities.

Attachment Enabled: If checked then the Runtime User Interface will have the ability to add attachments. For example, if you want to attach a photo and some documents to Contact Details.

Friends, I think, today we have got the basic understanding of Entity and its properties. In the next session, we will be covering the properties for other elements within Entity. So use the knowledge gained in this session in your application.

Till we meet again...

Its goodbye from ArtDeveloper...