Objects in BEdita
=================

.. _bedita-objects:

Objects definition
------------------

Brief definition: BEdita ``objects`` (see :term:`object`) are the contents of your application,
the atoms of the information asset you are building.

BEdita ``objects`` also represent your application data model.

Let's try to explain that with some examples: are you building an application to show a museum collection?

Your objects will be artworks, authors and maybe historical events, locations and museum rooms,
but also images and videos.

All of them with some relations between them: an artwork was **created_by** an author (or more authors),
it could **represent** an historical event, it was **created** on a particular place
and be **located** in a museum room or **borrowed** from another museum or gallery.

Are you building a rental car application?

Your objects will probably be cars, car companies, customers, locations of your offices and so on.
Applying some relations you may have a car that has been **produced by** a car company,
**rented** by a customer from an office.

You can create your custom object types from scratch but you have also a vast collection of core object types
ready to use that may already fit your needs, like:

* contents like documents, events, news
* multimedia items like images, video, audio or collections of those items
* folders that contain other folders or contents to build a hierarchical and browsable structure for your data

Not everything is an ``object`` in BEdita, unlike what happens in Java and other platforms.

An object in BEdita is identified with these capabilities:

* you may extend it adding new properties
* you may create semantic relations between objects
* objects can be put in a :term:`folder` and have `tags` or `categories`
* every change on object properties is versioned
* objects can be translated in other languages
* objects share a common id space and have a unique name for every project - an url friendly string identifier
* you may create new object types inheriting an existing object type

Other entities in BEdita are called `resources` (see :term:`resource`).
Resources have a fixed and predefined structure and can be classified in four basic groups:

* entities like tags, categories, permissions or annotations are special entities that we assign to objects: they are not objects itself, they rather define object properties
* entities like object types, relations, properties are used to design our object model
* other entities like endpoints, configurations, applications, auth providers will be rarely seen directy by API client developers or applications users: they handle API and project internal behaviors
* roles are special entities used only to give users permissions on objects, endpoints or object types - they are not objects

``Users`` (see :term:`user`) instead are a special object type: you may add properties and relations
to other objects, but you may not extend it with a new type.

It's a powerful yet simple model design that you may use successfully in a wide range of applications.