Designing the Procedure Logic › Build Action Diagrams › Procedure Synthesis to Build an Action Diagram › Neighbor List

Neighbor List

Some procedures require the user to enter data about two or more related entity types. Often the information to be entered is the identifier of an entity occurrence that is to be associated with some central entity being created or updated in the procedure. For example, in the data model fragment shown in the following illustration, CUSTOMER is a neighbor of ORDER.

When a procedure creates an order, the identifier of the customer must be supplied so that the order can be associated with one customer. In this example the user does not know the customer identifier.

One solution, shown in the following illustration, is to design a list procedure that the user may link to, select the customer entity, and return from after obtaining the identifier of the chosen customer entity occurrence.

Synthesizing a neighbor selection list flow lets you add a flow from a current procedure step to a selection list procedure step. For example, you could add Enter Order. The selection list procedure step has any subject entity type, in this case customer, which could be that of the current procedure step.