General Settings

Name

Display name for the Object Class.

Composition

Genus Apps allows you to define an Object Class composed of other Object Classes to form a composition. To include the Object Class as part of a composition, in the Part of Object Class box, select the Object Class which represents the composition. In the Parent/Child Property box, select which property to use to determine the relationship between the Object Class and the composition. You can only select properties with a complex data interpretation equal to the selected composition. These settings are only available when the Object Class is created.

The Min Occurences option determines the minimum number of objects of the Object Class reqired for the composion to be valid. For example, a company is required to have at least one address.

The Max Occurences option determines if the relationship between the composition and the Object Class is a one to one relationship (One), or a one to many relationship (Unbounded). For example, an automobile is composed of many wheels but only one engine (unless it is a hybrid electric-petroleum vehicle).

If the Object Class defines a simple relation between two Object Classes, for example, tags used to categorize pictures or files, you can specify a Domain Property. The domain property is used by Genus in forms and tables to ease the task of adding or removing a relation, and create new objects of the type given by the domain property. This setting is only available when the Object Class is created. To filter which tags to be available, specify Domain Condition. This required that Enable as Tag is selected. For more information on how to set condition, see Condition.

In the example above, you would define three Object Classes: Picture, Picture Tag and Tag. Picture Tag has two outbound references, one to Picture and one to Tag, and is part of the Picture composition. The outbound reference to Tag is defined as the domain property. When the user selects one or more pictures in a table, commands for adding or removing tags are added to the shortcut menu. If a tag does not exist, the user can easily add a new tag and attach the new tag to a picture.

To disable commands for adding or removing relations in the shortcut menu, click to clear the Enable as Tag checkbox.****************

Nested data

If data for an Object Class is organized in a parent-child relationship, you must specify which property that identifies this relationship. This is sometimes termed a recursive or self-referential data structure, since it contains pointers or references to itself. At the first-, or top level in the structure, the objects has no reference to a parent object. To identify objects at this level, you must specify a condition. For example, parent has no value or level = 1.

Examples of recursive data structures are

• A folder structure for organizing files and folders
• A Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) for defining and organizing a project using a hierarchical tree structure
• A descision tree

Description

Documentation of the purpose and content of the Object Class.