Introduction to Views › Views

Views

You create views through view maintenance by assigning a view set, or a collection of views, to a process. In the view set, you specify three types of views that processes can relate to entities:

• Import views show information about an entity that a process receives (or imports)
• Export views show information about the entity that a process produces (or exports)
• Entity action views show stored information about an entity that a process manipulates during execution

Import, export, and entity action views are called view subsets, meaning possible groupings of views within a view set. A fourth view subset, local views, includes views in which processes temporarily save information during execution.

The following illustration shows the types of views you can define at each stage of the methodology and the tools used. The following chart allows you to view subsets by activity and tool.

Note: You can create views for functions during Planning but, in practice, you rarely need to specify this type of information at the function level. You may wish to record views for functions if you anticipate some benefit for doing so. Generally you only record views for processes and, most frequently, for elementary processes.