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Nearly any application developed on the SimpleOne platform involves information exchange between users, third-party systems and the application itself, as well as data processing. This means that the application receives the information, processes and stores it, and then the information is consumed by the user and third-party services (systems). Therefore it is important to approach the design and preparation of the data structure that will be used to store and process information based on the business task an application is designed to perform.

Despite the fact that data and information are similar in meaning, there is a significant difference between them. Information is precise and structured data. In other words, before the data becomes information, they must be structured. To build a data structure a data model is used.

Data model

A data model is an abstract description of a data structure, which determines interrelations between the data, methods of their processing as well as how one item of data relates to another.

There are various data models, which differ in their approach to description of data organization. For example an hierarchy model describes the data as a tree structure, consisting of objects of different levels. In the SimpleOne system the relation data model is used, based on relations and operations with these relations. The main notions of the relation data model are relation, attribute, tuple and primary key. In the SimpleOne data structure these correspond to the table, column, table row, which has a unique identifier within the table.

Tables

The SimpleOne platform stores all its data and business logic settings of the configuration as records in specific tables.

From this set of articles you will learn about the role of tables in the SimpleOne system, and their properties, relevant to the development of the data structure. A separate article is dedicated to the classification of tables.

Columns

Tables consist of columns each of which corresponds to a specific attribute of the information object and has its own data type.

From this set of articles you will learn about properties and attributes of columns relevant to the development of the data structure, using dot-walking in scripts as well as how to change column name and column types in certain cases.  

Records

A record (a row in a relation table) is a set of logically related fields corresponding to a specific instance of an information object. Each record in the system has a unique identifier.

From this article you will learn about the record attributes and operations with them.

Extending the Data Model

In cases when creating a data structure from scratch is not practical, the SimpleOne system allows to adapt previously prepared out-of-the-box data structures to the requirements of the business solution. From this article you will learn about the data model extension methods available in the SimpleOne system, each of which has its uses, strength and weaknesses.

Version Control of Data Structure Changes

All changes of the data model, irrespective of its methods, are collected into configuration packs and applications.

This article provides general recommendations on creating configuration packs and applications.