Entities represent objects or things of interest. These can be physical things such as buildings and products, or more abstract things, such as orders and projects. Entities have the following properties:
- A general type or class, such as building or country
- Instances of that type; France and India are instances of country
- Attributes, such as name and ISO country code
- Relationships – describes links to other entities, such as this building is located in this country; this country has these buildings
Entities are used to model and manage business data. Conceptually, an entity is like a database table, and the entity attributes correspond to the table columns. Creating an entity record is like adding a row to a database table.
Entities are the key building blocks of the CDS. In the CDS, an entity is more than just a database table with columns and relationships. An entity contains other components to support applications. The components of an entity are as follows...