Terminology
Terminology that you bump into while configuring flows interacting with IFS Cloud
Projections
The OData services within IFS are called Projections. Projections in are sets of API methods that, in most cases, correspond to a specific page in Aurena. There are for example projections that are designed completely for 3rd party integrations. But most of the 5500+ projections are to support the Aurena functionality, just as packages mainly supported functionally in the Enterprise Explorer in pervious versions.
There are different categories of projections, apart from the standard projections, in IFS cloud.
Custom Projection
As the name indicates this category of Projections is not standard to IFS. Custom Projection is the result of Projection Configuration or by deploying a Utility Package in the database. This can then be exposed as an Custom Projection.
Premium Projections
Premium projections is offered by IFS as a complement to standard projections. Standard projections are primarily designed to support Aurena pages. Premium projections on the other hand is designed for integrations. Premium Projections replaces the old BizAPIs.
Entity
"An entity is any singular, identifiable and separate object. It refers to individuals, organizations, systems, bits of data or even distinct system components that are considered significant in and of themselves."
-technopedia.com
In IFS Cloud domain an Entity is a business object such as a "Customer" or "Sales Part" object that defines the attributes, methods and relationships to other entities.
Entity details (=Entity Type) can be in inspected in IFS Solution Manager, see
pageEntity detailsAttribute
Attributes describes the content of an entity. An entity has one or more attributes that represent how this entity should store and present itself to clients. Attributes are implemented as columns in the database but an attribute can also be derived from another entity.
Entity type
Entity type is a term for describing the structure of an Entity.
Entity Set
Entity set is a collection or set of all entities of a particular entity type. In IFS Cloud domain Entityset corresponds to a service entrypoint which can be accessed from a client.
One projection can contain several EntitySets.
Logical Unit (LU)
Reference Entity (also referred as expand)
Entity may or may not have references to other Entities which have 0:1 relationship to entity. Example entity Part has 1:1 relationship to entity UnitCode.
Reference Array
Entity may or may not have references to other Entities which have 0:N relationship to entity. Example entity Customer may have 0..N addresses.
Virtual Entity Set
A virtual is a type of entity that can be described as a temporary entity. It behaves as an entity, and it can basically do anything that a normal entity can do.
The main difference is that it does not require an LU, so there are no business logic and restrictions attached to it. It is mainly for storing data temporarily, until the user decides that the data entry is finished.
Virtual entity sets are used in Aurena client for example in assistant functionalities like External File Assistant or Assigning Work Task.
Another important difference is that keys are created and handled automatically. Each virtual gets an Objkey and a ParentObjkey. The Objkey is the key for the record itself, and the ParentObjkey is used when there is a defined relationship, such as a reference or array.
ETag
The
ETag(or entity tag) HTTP response header is an identifier for a specific version of a resource. It lets caches be more efficient and save bandwidth, as a web server does not need to resend a full response if the content was not changed. Additionally, etags help to prevent simultaneous updates of a resource from overwriting each other (also called "mid-air collisions").-modzilla.org
In IFS Cloud Etag is a Base64 encoded string of columns Objid + Objversion from the underlying table.
Batch
A Batch request is a single HTTP request containing multiple nested HTTP request. This allows for reduced number of API requests when for example adding lines to a parent object. If the Batch feature exist for the particular request being made it will show up in the machine step configuration. See the Operations in OData machine steps section.
Read more:
IDP - Identity Provider
Identity Provider is service which authenticates user. IFS Cloud has its own IDP. External IDP refers to Azure AD, Okta etc.
Request
REST API call.
Response
Data returned by operation call.
Payload
Data sent to IFS in POST, PATCH and BATCH operations is called Payload.
Projection metadata
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