Working with subsets

Simple business objects contain a set of attributes, one of which is the primary key. They provide a result set that contains values for each of the defined attributes in each returned record. More complex business objects may contain subsets, where each record in the main set (for example, an order) can itself contain a subset with an unspecified number of related records (for example, line-items belonging to the order). Further subsets might also be nested, for example to allow configuration options for some or all of the line-items in a given order.

The database itself is not necessarily organized in the same way as implied by the set of business objects, attributes and subsets in Infor e-Commerce Development Studio. The structure we see here is an abstraction that is created within the application layer for the purpose of supporting the specific way in which the data will be used in the application. Using the order-form example, the actual database might include an order-header table (which contains the customer names and order numbers) and a separate order-line table (which contains all of the order line records, each of which includes the order number for the order to which it belongs).

For the subsets to work as expected, you must configure the connector correctly and choose the appropriate fields (under the appropriate joins) for the attributes within the subset.