The cornerstone of the solution architecture is the concept of the mobile business object (MBO). Mobile business objects help form the business logic for mobile applications and mobile workflows by defining the data you want to use from your backend system and to expose through your mobile application or workflow.
MBO development involves defining object data models with back-end EIS connections, attributes, operations, and relationships that allow filtered data sets to be synchronized to mobile devices. MBOs are built by developers familiar with the data and transactional requirements of the mobile application, and how that connects to the existing EIS data sources.
- Created using the Unwired WorkSpace graphical tools.
- Reusable, allowing you to leverage business logic or processes across multiple device types.
- Future-proofing your application; when new device types are added, the same MBO can be used.
- Implementation-level details – metadata columns that include information about the data from a data source.
- Abstract-level details – attributes that correspond to instance-level properties of a programmable object in the
mobile client, and map to data source output columns. Parameters correspond to
synchronization parameters on the mobile client, and map to data source arguments. For example, output of a SQL SELECT query are mapped as attributes, and the arguments in the WHERE clause are mapped as synchronization parameters, so that the client can pass input to the query.
MBO operations include parameters that map to data source input arguments. Operation parameters determine information a client passes to the enterprise information system (EIS).
- Relationships – defined between MBOs by linking attributes and parameters in one MBO, to attributes and parameters in another MBO.
Developers define MBOs using either a top-down approach—first designing attributes and parameters, then binding them to a data source; or a bottom-up approach—first specifying a data source, then automatically generating attributes and parameters from it.
A mobile application package includes MBOs, roles, and data source connection mappings, and other artifacts that are delivered to the Unwired Server during package deployment.