Events

An event is an object with a time stamp. You define event types in your business model to represent the things that happen in your business. Events contain data about the things that happen and must conform to the event type that you define in the model.

The time stamp represents the time at which the event occurred, and it has a date & time type. An event type has attributes and relationships, and it can inherit from an existing event type.

You define an event type by using one of the following syntaxes:

• In the following syntax, you give a specific name to the timestamp attribute.

<an event> is a business event time-stamped by <a time>.

• In the following syntax, a default timestamp attribute is created.

<an event> is a business event.

The following example shows a flight event type with a flight time:

a flight event is a business event time-stamped by a flight time.

The following example shows a flight event type with a default time stamp:

a temperature change event is a business event.

An event type can be based on another event type to inherit attributes and relationships from it. As a consequence, an event that is an instance of the inheriting event type is also an instance of the type from which this type inherits characteristics. You can define an event type based on an existing event type by using the following syntax:

<an event> is <an event>.

In the following example, a flight late departure event type inherits from an existing flight event type:

a flight late departure event is a flight event.