Objects

Content Engine's design is based on an object-oriented architecture: users, administrators, and processes create and interact with objects that Content Engine then stores and manages. Some types of objects are built -in and are an essential part of the Content Engine's internal design. Others embody your specifically designed business functions and carry out the day-to-day work of the system.

Objects can represent business processes that provide values to workflow steps carried out by Process Engine. Or they can represent real things that end users care about, such as contracts or engineering specifications. Objects based on the Document class—Document objects—can contain content that comprises the actual contract or engineering specification; the content can be stored in the object store's file store or database store. Actions are performed against objects using its properties as variables. Regardless of how or where it is used, it retains its properties and security information.

Objects can also represent components required for system management and administration, such as folder properties, security, storage rules and behavior, search and index information, and so on.

Objects within an object store are stored in the associated database. When a business process adds a new object to an object store, Content Engine stores it in the database that was populated during the object store's installation. Enterprise Manager provides a number of Wizards that make it easy to create new classes, objects, and properties.

Properties

Properties are the individual values that describe the object. As you would expect, properties are assigned a type that defines what sort of value they can contain. Property types include string, integer, binary, boolean, and date/time.

The object store always includes a set of system properties whose meaning is predefined.

System designers can add additional properties to the built-in class objects installed with Content Engine or to subclasses created later. These new properties will appear on the objects that are created as instances of those classes. The properties that are included in a particular object are actually instances of property templates. A single property template can be used to propagate the same property into more than one class.

Properties have a set of attributes that control their behavior. These include datatypes, cardinality, whether the property value is required, constraints such as minimum and maximum values.

See Properties for more information.

Methods

If properties are the nouns of an object, methods are the verbs.

Methods are the actions that users and processes can take on the object, provided they have adequate permission. For example, most objects let you rename them, or add them to a list of objects to be exported. The Document class lets you take many powerful actions on documents, such as checkout, checkin, copy, and delete. Enterprise Manager provides easy access to the actions that system administrators will need to manage individual object. The pop-up menus (available by selecting the object and right-clicking) of each type of object lists the actions supported for that kind of object. Actions that require several steps are supported by wizards. For example, class objects like the Document class or the Folder class let you launch a wizard to create a subclass from their pop-up menu. Enterprise Manager also exposes actions on objects' property sheets. For example, a Document object's property sheets provides access to checkout, checkin, cancel checkout, and other document-related methods.

See Classes for more information.

Events

Content Engine has a full featured set of capabilities for describing and assigning events and lifecycles. Changes in property values are often assigned as the trigger for an event. A simple example would be a boolean property triggering an event when its value goes from True to False. As another example, the Create trigger, which fires when an instance of a subscribed class is created, can cause a pre-defined workflow process to execute.

See Events and Subscriptions for more information.

Object Security

Access to Content Engine objects is controlled by the security settings for that object as well as by the permissions granted to the user or process attempting to carry out an action on the object. By applying security policies to Document objects, administrators can configure the Content Engine to apply pre-selected permissions to a document as it goes through various predefined versioning states.

See Security Guide for more information on FileNet P8 Platform security and security policies.