Business object methods

A business object's methods are the set of commands that the business object is able to execute. The following types of methods can provided by a business object:

• Delete, which deletes records from the data source

• Find, which retrieves data from the data source

• Insert, which creates a new record in the data source

• Update, which updates existing records in the data source

• Generic, which makes some other type of operation in the database, such as executing a stored procedure.

You can customize each method to work with a specific set of attributes; apply selection criteria, bindings and sorting criteria; and set input and output parameters for stored procedures. As a result, a significant amount of business logic can be built into each method. Some business objects may therefore include several methods of the same type, but with each of them fine-tuned to produce a slightly different type of result.

Each method is implemented as a pipeline, which consists of several pipeline stages, each of which interacts with a specific data source while using and updating the current pipeline context (typically a result set being passed along the pipeline). The basic function of a given method is established by the general properties of its pipeline; the details about the way the method interacts with the various data sources available and makes additional calculations are controlled by the set of stages belonging to the pipeline and their settings. For a general discussion about how the pipeline works, see Method pipelines.