Creating a custom business entity

You can create a custom entity by copying a standard entity and its sup-resources through the Resource Hierarchy tree.

About this task

Note: does not support resources with the same view group ID across entities. Hence, if you are copying entire entities for extending the screens, you must modify the view group IDs for all views, actions, links and icons for the new entities. This is to make sure that they do not conflict with the original entities you copied.

For example, if you want to create a custom business entity called Planned Order, you can use the following procedure:

To create a custom business entity:

Procedure

  1. From the Resource Hierarchy tree, navigate to an entity that you want to use a template. Choose an entity whose resources and sub-resources closely resemble the ones that you want to create.
  2. Select Save As to create the new set of resources for an entity, including sub-resources.

    When you save the entity, give it a unique prefix that does not conflict with any resource IDs that might ship with future releases.IBM® recommends that you choose any prefix except one that begins with the letter Y (which is reserved for use by the application).

  3. Modify the description of the new entity resource. Modify the descriptions of any sub-resources. Note that the resource descriptions appear in the console; therefore, they can be localized as needed. To verify that literals can be localized, use the resource description entered here as the resource bundle key in all of the appropriate resource bundles.
  4. Create entries for these newly created resource keys in the INSTALL_DIR/extensions/global/resources/extnbundle.properties file and in the corresponding properties files for each locale.
    Note: Ensure that the following file does not exist:
    INSTALL_DIR/resources/extn/extnbundle.properties

    This file must be removed because it will conflict with the extensions build process for bundle entries.

  5. Repeat Step 1 through Step 3 for the Related Entities of the entity being copied.
  6. Update the Related Entities Resources under the newly created entity resources to point to the newly created resources.
  7. In order to make all links point appropriately to your new view, follow the steps in "Incorporating Customized Views Across the Application."