Modules and business objects

The database comprises a number of different modules that correspond to different business lines. For example, there are modules for Problem Management, Change Management, Request Management, and so on. Each of these modules contains a number of business objects that you use to capture information and a top-level object that you can create processes for.

Business objects

Business objects are the basic building blocks of the database, representing all of the items with which you can work. Business objects can be physical items such as users or assets, or they can be abstract items such as Requests, Problems, or Changes.

Attributes

Each business object has a set of attributes that describe the information that you want to record about that business object. Each business object can have a different set of attributes. For example, for the business object User, you might want to record the attributes Name, Telephone Number, Location, and so on, whereas for the business object Problem, you might want to record Description, Urgency, the Date that the problem was logged and so on.

Each instance of a business object can have a different set of values for its attributes.

For more information about business object attributes, see Attributes.

Subclasses

Some objects in the database are subclasses of other objects. For example, Problem and Change are subclasses of Process; Asset is a subclass of Configuration Item; End User is a subclass of User, and so on.

Attributes that you add to the parent class are automatically available on the subclass – so if you add an attribute to the Process Management\Process object, it will also be available to Incident Management\Incident. However, when you add attributes to the individual subclasses, those attributes are available only to the subclass.

You can add attributes to objects that have the same name as an existing attribute on a parent or subclass only if the attributes are of the same type and size.

Relationships

As well as having attributes, business objects can also have relationships. For example, if a user uses a specific asset, then you can create an association between an instance of the business object User and an instance of the business object Asset. This is known as a relationship.

For more information about business object relationships, see Relationships.