Key Concepts

Understand key concepts prior to preparing your ProcessMaker REST API requests.

Understand the following key concepts from which to better understand what the entity object is prior to preparing your REST API requests:

• Entity type

• Entity

• Attributes

Entity Type

An entity type describes a class of objects and their attributes. For example: a Person can be an entity type.

Entity

An entity is an instance of an entity type / a single object. For example: John Doe is an instance of Person.

Attributes

Attributes are characteristics that pertain to an entity type. An attribute represents a small piece of information about an entity. For example, the Person entity type could have an attribute called date of birth.

Entity Object

The ProcessMaker REST API represents an entity object as the following endpoints based on these key concepts:

• Type

• Attributes

• Relations

Below is an example of an entity object of an entity of type file you may reference in the representations that follow.

{
  "type": "file",
  "attributes": {
    "createdAt": "2019-11-19T13:37:46.824+0000",
    "createdBy": null,
    "documentType": "NONE",
    "modifiedAt": "2019-11-19T13:37:46.824+0000",
    "name": "Welcome to IDP.docx",
    "modifiedBy": null,
    "checkedOutBy": null,
    "id": "bd37f241-7b05-4ba8-ae0b-ab844daafd36",
    "content": null
  },
  "relations": {
    "parent": "/api/rest/folder/5f97858b-26e3-4180-80c4-25b176cbc35f"
  }
}

Type

Type is a string that represents the type of an entity.

Attributes

Attributes are JSON key-value pairs store data that pertain to an entity.

Relations

Relations is a JSON object that represents references to and from a specified entity object. For example, a parent entity is defined by its child JSON objects. Inversely, the child JSON objects are collectively defined by its parent. Below is an example of a relation.

"relations": {
            "parent": "/api/rest/folder/b9072a85-2214-4f55-9ca6-e29ad59167a1",
            "files": "/api/rest/folder/97869a7d-946a-4f7c-b612-34f5e5ab02ce/files"
        },