Identifying entities, patterns and relationships

You can use four types of evidence relationships: parent-child, pre-associated, multiple mandatory parents, and related relationships.

Identifying entities

Evidence is data that is collected by an organization to facilitate the delivery of services to the organization's clients. In the application, evidence is typically used to determine clients' eligibility and entitlement. For the Evidence Generator, evidence is:
  • Any entity that implements the standard evidence interface AND
  • Maintained by the evidence solution.

Identifying patterns

A pattern is any function the evidence entity uses. Examples of functions are:
  • Features within a maintenance screen
  • Extra code that is specific to an entity
By using metadata that is captured in XML, a function of the Evidence Generator is to specify the patterns that apply to specific entities. During evidence generation, the metadata is read and converted to the appropriate feature. Examples are:
  • A button on a client page.
  • A callout class stub where you can then implement business logic.

Identifying relationships

In evidence, relationships describe how evidence entities interact and exist in relation to each other. Use a function in the generator to specify the relationships between evidence entities. Then, the generator produces the associated server-side code and client page functions to facilitate the maintenance of the relationships. You can use four types of evidence relationships: parent-child, pre-associated, multiple mandatory parents, and related relationships.

Parent-Child relationships
Parent-Child is one of the most common logical relationships between evidence entities. Typically, a parent-child relationship is a one-to-many relationship where:
  • The parent can have many children AND
  • Each child must belong to a parent.
Use parent-child relationships to capture the logical relationship between two entities where:
  • The child entity cannot live without the parent entity AND
  • The details on the child are logically related to the details captured on the parent.
An example of a parent-child relationship is where:
  • Student details are stored in a student entity AND
  • Student expenses are stored in a student expenses entity.
In this example, student expenses cannot exist without the student entity, but the student entity can exist on its own.
Pre-Associated relationships

Pre-Associated relationships are non-hierarchical relationships between evidence entities that can exist independently of each other. Before you create the evidence, you must know the association between evidence entities so that you can access data from the associated entity as you create the evidence.

Multiple mandatory parents relationships

Use the multiple mandatory parents relationship pattern where an entity must simultaneously be the child of more than one parent entity.

Related relationships

Related relationships are non-hierarchical. Use related relationships to associate an evidence record to a non-evidence record. A primary example is the relation of evidence-based employment records to the core employment record. That relationship is found in all evidence-based modules that are built by the application.

Examples of evidence-based employment entities are:
  • Self-employment
  • Paid employment
Such examples are a key functional area typical of solutions. For this reason, evidence-based employment entities are categorized as a separate pattern.