Figure BT.01 - Base Types

This paragraph covers the Base Types ABE from Common Business Domain that have been found to be useful during the documentation of the SID business models.<br/>Standard types like String, Integer etc are not covered as these are usually provided by commonly used programming languages.<br/>It is not intended to define simplistic restricted fundamental types like String(7) or Number(3).<br/>These Base Types are not intended to have their own identity (they don’t have an id like a Managed Entity). This means that these entities would not normally be shared, but would be private attributes of an entity.<br/>Fowler defines entities like these as “value objects”, which he defines as:<br/><i>“A small simple object, like money or a date range, whose equality isn't based on identity” [Fowler-PoEAA]</i><br/>When there is a need to show that a Business Entity is only valid for a certain time, this will be shown by an attribute called validFor, of type TimePeriod. In the design model, temporal support may be implemented in other ways, [Fowler-time] but this approach has been chosen for the analysis model as it shows the requirement without cluttering up the model.<br/>