Data Element
A data element is at the core of NS systems. It represents information used in the application.
Data-elements are often related to nouns used to describe the workings of your application. E.g. when creating an application to receive messages and put them into message-boxes, we would be defining the data-elements Message and MessageBox.
In general, this means that a data element should be the anthropomorphic translation of some real-life object or concept to a digital representation.
Attributes
Every data element has a few basic attributes, like the name.
| Attribute | description |
|---|---|
| name | The name of the element, in PascalCase (also see naming convention) |
| packageName | The java package to which the element belongs |
| type | The data type as described above |
| status | When defining a component, the Prime radiant will process it. This state will be ‘Ready’, unless an error occurs |
Fields
Data-elements should describe 1 or more fields. Fields are a combination of attributes and links to other elements.
Finders
Data-elements describe a number of finders. These finders define a combination of fields that can be used as parameters when querying the system.
Projections
By default a data-element has the Details, Info and DataRef projections, which are expanded into java objects used to transport data in the application.
It is possible for developers to define additional projections in order to have more representations for a data-element.
Commands
A data-element can also define a number of commands. A command is an operation which can be executed in the application with or without parameters and optionally a target instance of the data-element.