Introduction to Views

This chapter begins the discussion of views, which includes how to create, use, and manipulate views in specific tools. These activities span tasks that are associated with Analysis and Design tools.

To understand views, you must first understand the relationship between entities and processes. By itself, an entity has little meaning to a business. An entity takes on meaning when a business activity processes information about the entity and makes that information available. For example, unless a business knows the name, address, and telephone number of a customer named Jane Doe, the fact that she is a customer is of no interest to the business. The mechanism through which an activity (generally an elementary process) receives, uses, and produces information is a view. It is a window through which a process communicates information about entities.

Another way of illustrating views is as vantage points from which processes see entities. You provide views on a need-to-know basis. For example, one process might need to view only the Status attribute of an entity occurrence of CUSTOMER to accomplish its task. Another process might need to see the Name and Address attributes of CUSTOMER. By carefully defining the scope of views, you can control and restrict access to shared information.