Glossary

The Simplicité platform has several configuration concepts that are defined bellow and that you must understand before going thru the training trail:

• A Module is a packaging unit. All configuration items belongs to a module. There are several packaging strategies that you can apply (one module per business application, or per business scope, etc.). It is however important to think of modules dependencies in order that your configuration can be exported/imported consistently. A module does not correspond to any visible generic UI concept, it is a pure packaging concept.
• A Domain is a generic UI concept that corresponds to one main menu entry, you can have business object, business workflows, external objects entries in a domain
• A Business object is the core configuration item that corresponds to a business concept (a customer, a product, a company, an order, an invoice, etc.)
  • A business object aggregates Business fields. The relationship between business object and business field is a many to many relationship because a business field can be used by several business objects, for instance the customer name business field can be physically associated to the customer object while being logically associated to order and invoices). A business field has a type and default behavior (mandatory, visible, etc.) that are enforced by the platform.
  • Some business field may be foreign keys pointing to other business objects, for such Link business fields you can configure additional behavior (e.g. cardinality, cascade copy/delete, etc.)
  • For one business object, one list of value field can be associated to a State model, in this case the business object has a state-driven workflow behavior (state model transitions are granted to users using the group concept, see bellow)
  • Business object’s fields can be grouped in Field areas. A business object can have several field areas which generic UI layout is defined by a form Template (which is a HTML fragment)
  • Additional Actions can be associated to a business object to offer additional processing (displayed as a custom button in the generic UI and available as the business object’s web service)
  • Dynamic business logic can be associated to a business object
    • By using Constraints that can be used to change business object’s and/or business fields behavior depending on a given condition (a constraint can be restricted to some groups)
    • By implementing Hooks in the business object’s optional Server Script (hooks are points of extension), actions are generally implemented in this server script
• A Business workflow corresponds to a chain of Activities (that can be conditional and sequential but also parallel using split/joined strategies)
  • An activity is granted to groups (see bellow) and can be of different standard types using business objects (search, selection, form, …) but also specific
• An External object is a specific component:
  • It can be a specific web page, either a generic UI specific page or a full custom page
  • It can be a specific web service
  • It can also be any other specific component (e.g. a PDF publication)
• A Disposition is a generic UI concept that allow to override Resources (images, CSS styles) to customize the generic UI rendering
  • Resources can also be associated to business objects and to external objects
• A View is a generic UI concept that allows to aggregates different UI components on a single web page (that can be the global or a domain’s home page or a custom business object’s panel)
• A Shortcut is a generic UI concept that allows to offer a shortcut link on the top right of the main page (a shortcut can point to a business object page or to a custom URL)
• A Pivot table can be used to do axis-based reports on selected business object’s records
• A Publication template allows to publish a business object (and its linked business objects) using a custom publication template document (a publication template can also be a custom method in the server script)
• A Group is a unit that defines access right functions through Grant
• A User is associated to several groups using, each association is called Responsibility
• A System parameter defines a global feature of the platform, a system parameter can be overridden by disposition and/or by user

All configuration items (domains, business objects, business fields, etc.) are associated to Translations to hold the various labels (and help texts) of these configuration items in configured languages.