Applications

An application is a collection of administrative objects (attributes, relationships and types) defined by the Business Administrator and assigned to a project.

An application acts as a central place where all application-dependent associations to these other administration objects are defined. The application members (the types, relationships, and so on) can have different levels of protection (private, protected, or public). This protection also extends to the objects governed by them. For example, if you mark a relationship as protected, all connections of that type are also marked as protected.

You can design your application's data model such that you can mark part or all of it as private or protected. The data you mark private cannot be accessed from any other project while the data you mark protected can only be viewed and not modified. If your company is working on a top-secret government project, you will need to mark the data connected to this project as private to avoid any accidental viewing or modification of data. You can do this by assigning an owning application to your project.

The advantage of assigning an owning application to a project is that it ensures data integrity. All modifications to the data are handled by the owning application code which performs all necessary checks to ensure complete data integrity. This prevents any unintended mishandling and possible corruption of data. Thus, when an Collaboration and Approvals product (or any custom application) tries to access data marked private or protected by connecting to the server, it has to specify the name of the owning application containing that data. You can specify an application name only in the Studio Customization Toolkit.