Entities, Records and Entity Types

The database is designed to hold information about three kinds of entities that are associated with APA construction:

• components
• actions
• workflows

More detailed descriptions about each kind of entity can be found in their respective Wiki articles (please click on the links above).

Regardless of what kind of entity it is, each individual entity that is stored in the database has a corresponding record. This is a JSON-formatted document containing all of the information associated with that entity - whether provided automatically by the database, or manually entered by a user. Most of the information is common or equivalent across the different kinds of entities, but there are small differences - please see the following Wiki articles for full descriptions of exactly what is stored in each kind of entities' records:

• component record fields
• action record fields
• workflow record fields

Entity Types

Components, actions and workflows can be sub-divided into different types, and different types of entity records will then contain different information. For example, one type of component is a 'geometry board', and another type of component is an 'APA frame' - they are both 'component' entities, but the specific information about a geometry board will be different from that of an APA frame, and so their records will differ slightly in this regard even though they will both be 'component' records.

To make it easier to record many entities of the same type, the database uses type forms. These are simply pre-built templates, one for each type of component, action or workflow, which indicate what specific information is expected to be recorded about a particular entity type. Continuing the example from above, each time a user wants to record a new geometry board in the database, they will enter information into a 'geometry board type form', which will tell the user exactly what information is expected for any generic geometry board component record.