Introduction

The Business Entity Designer in the SmartComponentLibrary is a graphical modeling tool for defining OERA-style Business Entities. Instead of hand-coding ProDatasets and Temp-Tables, you design them visually: you drag tables onto a canvas, define relations, indexes, and fields, and the designer stores this model in a Business Entity Diagram file (.bedgm), which is an XML representation of the dataset structure.

The Business Entity Designer generates all required ABL artifacts for you, including:

• Include files for each Temp-Table and ProDataSet

• The Business Entity class itself

• The DataAccess class

• Dataset Model and strong-typed query classes

• The DatasetController class

• A PNG image of the visual model

Because the generated classes inherit from shared base classes, the amount of generated code is kept as small and maintainable as possible. In practice, the Business Entity Designer becomes the central tool for designing, maintaining, and regenerating your backend data model within the SmartComponentLibrary.

(For more detail, see “Training: Business Entity Designer”: https://consultingwerk.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SCL/pages/8093985/Training+Business+Entity+Designer)