Art of Software Reuse

Tip #15 – Separate Business Process Context from Core Data

Service contracts that automate business processes should not mix contextual data with core entity data.  The following are examples of contextual business process data – initiator info (the user who started the business process, their role(s)), current user info (the user who is executing a particular activity in the business process, their role(s), the set of actions that are valid based on the state of the business process, as well as routing/delegation attributes. Authentication tokens, channel specific information (e.g. call center processes will have specific attributes).  This type of information should be decoupled (or not mixed with) data entities such as Product specific or Customer specific information. You want to keep them separate so they are candidates for future reuse. If they are coupled together, both the process contract and the data attributes become specific to the project or application.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 8:38 am and is filed under Design, Reuse, SOA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.