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What is an Entity Model

An Entity Model is an abstract model of a customer data model. It is designed via several Entities and their relationships:

Buckets​

Buckets are the central Entity class for the definition of an entity model. Buckets are like container to collect data. Buckets don't hold real content data. They are more like an anchor for content entities. The real content is hold by these entity classes:

  • Text
  • MediaAsset
  • KeyValue
  • Price

It is possible to organize buckets in an hierarchy. A bucket can have sub entities. They have 1:n relationship to buckets.

A n:m relationship can be done using another entity class called cords

Text​

This class stores a text. It can be an HTML tagged text.

Media Asset​

A MediaAsset is usually an image or a PDF document. The Media Asset can be stored on a file system or a DAM system. A MediaAsset can be related to a Text entity (e.g. a caption)

Key Value​

In case of working with product data you usually have to store structured data like technical attributes. These attributes have a name (like weight) , a value (like "12") and a unit (like kg). These structured data are stored as KeyValue.

Price​

A Price has several attributes like price, currency, amount, package unit, minimum amount, graduated prices and valid dates.

TableData​

To ease the work with the comet tables the Entity Manager is able to prepare the table. These tables are usually calculated entities. For a better distinction of database tables and print media tables we call these entities TableData.

MetaData​

Each entity can have metadata as a list of KeyValues. The purpose of this is to maintain additional information about the content from the content system.

Context​

Each entity has exactly on Context. The Context determines common characteristics of an entity like language or country. The Context can set these characteristics in any combinations:

  • Well
  • Country
  • Language
  • Assortment

Example of an Entity Model​

These is an example of an entity model:

There are three levels: product group, products and articles.