Entity Classes

With some exceptions, direct customer use and modification of application Entity classes is now discouraged. In many cases, application Entity class operations have direct Facade-layer equivalents which have been marked as External, and these can be used by customers. Addition of stereotyped and non-stereotyped operations to application Entities is however still allowed, as is the setting of a number of Entity options.

Prior to version 6.0.3, attributes could be added to application Entity classes using extension. However, with source code being removed for areas of key functionality, customers will no longer have visibility as to whether attributes added via extension classes will be mapped to external APIs. For this reason, adding attributes to application Entity classes is now discouraged.

Customers wishing to add data to application screens should add new customer-specific Entity classes, and should wrap External application maintenance operations in their own process classes to maintain both tables atomically. Application screens can then be changed to point to the new process classes.

Note: Entities representing Evidence Types are an exception to this rule. Customers can continue to add attributes to such application Evidence Entities using extension, as this is required by the Evidence Generator.

In version 6.0.3, application Evidence Entities have incorrectly been marked as Internal; this will be corrected in a subsequent release. For now, customers using extension on Evidence Entities to add attributes may see discouraged warnings in Eclipse relating to these classes; these specific warnings can be ignored.

This note only applies to Entities which represent Evidence Types and not for any other application Entity class.