What Is a Business Object?

From the design perspective a business object defines a "thing" that end-users use in their day-to-day activities. For example:

• Users dealing with an order processing application would use the words Orders, Customers and Products.

• In working with e-mail people talk about Inboxes, OutBoxes and Messages.

• A Human Resources application would use Employees and Timesheets.

• In many applications, users talk about the Daily Reports, or the Monthly Reports – these can be business objects.

• A banking application would use Banks, Branches, Transactions, Customers and Accounts.

From the implementation perspective a business object exists within an application and defines the lowest level of end-user navigation control.

For example, in VLF-ONE business objects are used for navigation like this:

In VLF-WIN they are used like this:

Note that both VLF-ONE and VLF-WIN can visualize end-user navigations in ways other than show here.