Understanding how entities and BODs are used in business context messages

An entity represents a set of application content – for example, a customer record or an invoice document – that can be shared with other applications. The entity has attributes – for example, the customer name or an invoice number.

Infor uses standard entity names for content that is frequently shared across applications. For example, CustomerPartyMaster and InforSalesInvoice are common Infor entity names. SyteLine also has defined application-specific entity names for information that can be communicated externally but that is not common to other applications. For example, SyteLineVoucher, SyteLineJobSuffix, and SyteLineAccountUnitCode1 are application-specific entity names.

If there is a mapping from the current entity in the user interface to a corresponding Infor Business Object Document (BOD) noun instance, the bodReference is sent in a JSON business context message. The reference is to the BOD noun, but not a specific component in a noun. For example, from the inforPurchaseOrderLine business context entity, you can only reference the PurchaseOrder noun, but not the PurchaseOrder Line component of the PurchaseOrder noun.

If SyteLine is running in Infor Ming.le, business context messages are generated whenever a user opens a form or moves to a new record in the form. By default, when a user opens a form, a business context message is sent that includes the application’s logical ID and the form’s screenid. Some forms include additional entity or BOD information that can be sent in business context messages when users select a record on the form. The information in business context messages can be used by other context-sensitive applications. For example, the Customer Orders Lines form sends information about customer sales orders and order lines, which the IDM application can use to display documents related to the customer or the ordered item, in addition to documents for that specific order, in the Related Information context app.

The additional context information in a business context message for a form can be related to either entities or BODs, as long as the form is the system of record for the data. If a form optionally sends BOD-related values in a business context message, the message does not have to include all of the elements of the BOD.

This additional context information is stored as metadata in the database. This metatdata is used to define the formula to construct the JSON web container information using WinStudio keyword substitutions. The metadata is assembled and processed by an IDO method that is called when a form is initialized. Each element that is required in the external application integration is likely to be included in the metadata.

You can view this metadata in the Form External Message Entities form. If you want to send additional entity attributes or BOD metadata from a certain form in its business context message, you must first understand which entities or BODs are associated with that form. Then you can use the Form External Message Entities form to define the appropriate metadata.

See the Infor Ming.le Context Engine Development Guide for definitions of the attributes of a business context message.