Attributes are characteristics that describe and/or identify the entity. For example, a Customer entity typically has attributes for the name of the customer, an e-mail address and other personal information.
The domain model editor uses the following symbols for visualization of attribute properties:
|This attribute has one or more validation rules.|
|This attribute has a microflow that calculates the value of the attribute.|
The name property defines the name of the attribute. This name is used to refer to the attribute from forms, microflows, queries, constraints etcetera.
The type property defines the type of data that can be stored in the attribute. An attribute has one of the following types:
|AutoNumber||A positive or negative whole number.||AutoNumber attributes are automatically generated numbers. The default value of the attribute determines the first number that will be generated. Each created object will have an AutoNumber that is one greater than the previous one. AutoNumbers can only be used for persistable entities as the AutoNumber value is computed in the database.|
|Binary||Binary data. Can only be used for persistable entities as the data is stored in the database. For example an entire file.||In most cases you want to use an association to a FileDocument or Image to store file contents.|
|Boolean||True or false.|
|Currency||A positive or negative amount of money. The amount can have digits after the decimal point.||A Currency attribute is represented internally as a Java double-precision floating point number. The only difference between Currency and Float attributes is how they are represented in the client. Double precision is usually more than enough for office applications but rounding errors can occur when doing extensive calculations.|
|DateTime||A point in time consisting of a date and a time component accurate up to milliseconds.|
|Enum||One of the values of the given enumeration.|
|Float||A positive or negative number. The amount can have digits after the decimal point.|
|HashString||The hash value of a String or set of characters. It can among others contain letters, spaces and/or numbers. This type can for example be used to store a password.||Hash values are generated using the hash algorithm that is chosen in the Project Settings.|
|Integer||A whole number that can be positive (maximum 231-1, thus 2147483647), negative (minimum -231, thus -2147483648), or zero.|
|Long||A whole number that can be positive (maximum 263-1), negative (minimum -263), or zero.|
|String||A text containing letters, spaces, numbers and other characters.||For Mendix up to version 4.8.10): If you set the length of an existing String attribute to unlimited, existing data in the database will be truncated to 30 characters for Microsoft SQL Server or 24 characters for Oracle Database. For other database systems, all data will be preserved.|
The maximum size that can approximately be stored in an attribute of type binary depends on the database:
|1 MB||1 GB||2 GB||128 TB or limited by hard disk of server|
Default value: String
In a web shop you want to store the id, profile photo, level (for service quality), user name, password, activity, total of minutes spent online, year of subscription, date of birth, total amount of expenses and the standard amount of discount for a customer.
The id should be unique for every customer, so this attribute has type AutoNumber.
The photo will be represented by an association to an entity that specializes Image. You do not use a Binary attribute for this purpose.
Level has three possible values: High, Medium and Low. This is stored in an attribute of type Enum.
The password itself should not be stored, but only its hash value, thus it is stored in an attribute of type HashString.
A customer can be active or inactive, which is stored in an attribute named ‘Active’ of type Boolean.
Localize (only attributes of type ‘Date and time’)
This property indicates whether the date and time should be localized. By default localization is enabled. If you are not interested in the time component of a date (e.g. a birthday), you should set this property to ‘No’. Otherwise, the date can change because of time zone differences: a date and time early in the morning on April 2nd in Europe will be on April 1st in the U.S.A.
In technical terms, this property indicates whether the client assumes that the date and time are in a local time zone (Yes) or in UTC (No). In the former case, the date is first converted to UTC before being sent to the server and converted from UTC before being displayed.
Default value: Yes
Enumeration (only attributes of type ‘Enumeration’)
The enumeration property indicates which enumeration defines the possible values for this attribute.
Length (only attributes of type ‘String’)
This property specifies whether the length of a String is limited to a maximum or unlimited. In the case of a limited length, the ‘Max length’ property specifies the maximum (see below).
Default value: Limited
Max length (only attributes of type ‘String’)
The ‘Max length’ property specifies the number of characters that can be stored in the attribute.
Default value: 200
The default value property defines the value of this attribute when an object is created. The default value should be compatible with the type of the attribute.
|Type of the attribute||Default value of the default value property||Additional comments|
|AutoNumber||1||Starting value of the increment|
|DateTime||The default value should either comply with the format year-month-day (eventually postfixed by hour:minute, eventually postfixed by :second), or be
The source determines whether the value of the attribute is stored in the database or calculated by a microflow.
Take note of the following things when using calculated attributes:
Each time an object with a calculated attribute is retrieved, the attribute is calculated. Depending on the complexity of the microflow and the number of objects you retrieve this can have impact on performance.
Attributes that are calculated by a microflow are not stored in the database.
It is not possible to sort on an attribute for which this property is used, because sorting is done by the database engine.
Microflow (only if source is microflow)
If the source is a computation, the microflow property defines which microflow defines this computation to calculate the value of the attribute when the object is retrieved. The microflow should have a parameter of the type of the entity of the attribute and it should return a value with the same type as the attribute.
In a webshop you want to show the total expenses for each customer. These are calculated by retrieving all orders associated with the customer and adding their totals.