IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Get started with IBM BPM > Key concepts > Business objects
Defining business objects
You define business objects using the business object editor in Integration Designer. The business object editor stores the business objects as XML schema definitions.
Using XML schema to define business objects provides several advantages:
- XML schema provide a standards-based data definition model and a foundation for interoperability between disparate heterogeneous systems and applications. XML schema are used in conjunction with the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) to provide standards-based interface contracts among components, applications, and systems.
- XML schema define a rich data definition model for representing business data. This model includes complex types, simple types, user-defined types, type inheritance, and cardinality, among other features.
- Business objects can be defined by business interfaces and data defined in the Web Services Description Language, as well as by XML schema from industry standards organizations or from other systems and applications. Integration Designer can import these business objects directly.
Integration Designer also provides support for discovering business data in databases and enterprise information systems and then generating the standards-based XML schema business object definition of that business data. Business objects generated in this fashion are often referred to as application specific business objects because they mimic the structure of the business data defined in the enterprise information system.
When a process is manipulating data from many different information systems, it can be valuable to transform the disparate representation of business data (for example, CustomerEIS1 and CustomerEIS2 or OrderEIS1 and OrderEIS2) into a single canonical representation (for example, Customer or Order). The canonical representation is often referred to as the generic business object.
Business object definitions, particularly for generic business objects, are frequently used by more than one application. To support this reuse, Integration Designer allows business objects to be created in libraries that can then be associated with multiple application modules.
The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) defines the he contracts for the services provided and consumed by a Service Component Architecture (SCA) application module, as well as the contracts used to create the components within an application module. In a contract, a WSDL can represent both the operations and business objects (which are defined by XML schema to represent the business data).