Business Model

The Business Model layer enables you to model your business including business concepts in classes, class relationships, business logic, and workflows. Classes and aspects enable you to model your enterprise concepts and their relationships, and powerful design-time workflows are used to model your business processes.

Model Description Language business model elements

The business model is composed of structural components, including:

• Classes - A class is an abstraction of a business model concept.
• Aspects - An aspect is a functional grouping of additional attributes or events that may be applied to your model. Aspects are displayed in the Classes tab on the Business Model layer.
• Augments - An augment contributes attributes, events, or actions to a given class. Augments are used for modularization, that is, separating the domain model into several modules without circular dependencies between them. They are displayed in the Classes tab on the Business Model layer.
• Enumerations - An enumeration is a special type of class that provide a list of values along with localizable captions.
• Diagrams - The Diagrams tab contains a UML class diagram editor for working with the model.

Classes and aspects are used to model classes and their relationships, including related behaviors and events. They allow consistent application of business rules and behaviors and support powerful and flexible mapping to physical storage.

The business model also contains behavioral components, including:

• Workflows and Workflow Queues - For more information, see Workflows.
• Rule sets - A set of rules to support run-time configurable business logic.

Workflows are tied to the object event lifecycle. For example, a workflow may be developed for when a new Case is created. Workflows support decisions, forks, queues, and wait states. They can be long-running and able to persist at specified wait states. Use workflows as an effective method of documenting and communicating system behaviors.

The Business Model layer also allows you to work with testing components, including:

• Unit tests - A set of test cases to test model functionality.
• Unit test suites - A grouping of unit tests for different test purposes.

Other components included in the Business Model layer are:

• BI Models - Deprecated. Simplified operational views for reporting. 
• Facets - A set of facets that can be applied to metadata objects.
  
• Semantic views and semantic attributes