QAD and Custom Business Objects and Profiles
QXO is shipped with a selection of critical business objects and profiles. These can either be used as they are—or more likely—copied and used as templates for your own business objects and profiles.For a listing of standard QXO business objects, see Standard QXO Business Objects for QAD Enterprise Applications.Important: Only an experienced professional with an understanding of the target application database structure should customize QAD-supplied business objects. QAD does not support custom or non-QAD-defined business objects. To ensure support for your customizations, engage QAD Services personnel to create new or modified business objects.
Typically, a business object has one primary table and other related tables that are joined to it. The business object definition identifies the join relationships. You can also specify filters to limit the data retrieved from the joined table. Then for each field in the table you can specify:• Whether the field is always published regardless of profile settings
• Whether the field is part of a primary table index
• Any fixed constant field values
• Programs to call to return the value for the field
When you start with a copy of a QAD business object or build your own, you can add additional tables and fields—as long as that business object does not employ DDP. You can also add your own custom fields to tables. These represent static values that you want to include whenever data from this business object is published. If, for example, you are designing a business object that will create an outbound QDoc that corresponds to an inbound QDoc, you might need to include values for fields that control the behavior of the QAD Enterprise Applications UI and that are not stored in the database.To streamline the creation of business objects, you can copy and paste data objects from one business object to another. For example, if you are creating a new object that references an address, you can copy the address data object associated with a different business object and paste it into the one you are creating.Note: You cannot copy and paste data objects from business objects that employ DDP.
Profiles are views of business objects tailored for the requirements of specific subscribers. You use profiles to select which components of a business object are sent to subscribers. The method for defining a profile is nearly identical to the method for defining a business object; however, unlike business objects, profiles always start as a copy of a default profile.