General Datatypes

Objects

At the highest level, all Aria logical model data are represented by objects. Objects are simply bundles of name/value pairs in a manner similar to JSON objects. Also similar to JSON objects, the fields of Aria's logical model objects may be simple primitives, may be complex structured elements such as other objects or arrays.

Object fields may have null values. Such a value indicates that that object element is defined to have no value.

Entities

Entities are a special kind of object. They are objects that have clear and unique identifiers. Those identifiers are called "Refs".

All entities are objects, but not all objects are entities. For instance, only entities may appear as the top-level values of data stream events. Non-entity objects may only appear as values contained within other higher level objects as either field or array elements.

Ref

An Object. Refs are references to Entities. Refs combine an Entity-Object type and the ID values that identify that object.

The specific IDs vary by entity type and are documented for each entity datatype. Some types have multiple IDs each of which can uniquely identify the entity by itself. An example is Account, where the "account_no", "client_account_id" and "userid" fields can each uniquely identify the same account by themselves. Other types require a combination of IDs to fully identify an object. An example of this is Payment_Method, where a combination of both "account_no" and "payment_method_no" are necessary in order to identify a specific payment method object.

Field name	Datatype	Description
type	Text	Name of a logical model datatype
IDs	Object	Associative array (a map) of an entity's ID values

Examples in JSON:

{ "type": "Account", "ids": { "account_no": 543262, "client_account_id": "john.doe", "userid": "991124" } }
{ "type": "Plan_Instance", "ids": { "plan_instance_no": 959239423, "client_plan_instance_id": "992.2221-z" } }
{ "type": "Transaction", "ids": { "transaction_no": 623496 } }
{ "type": "Payment_Method", "ids": { "account_no": 543262, "payment_method_no": 3 } }

Arrays

Some object fields are defined as being arrays of some other datatype. All elements of the array will conform to the defined element datatype. Arrays may have zero or more elements.

Primitives

These are the primitive datatypes used by the Aria logical model.

Type Name	Description
Text<max-size>	Freeform text. <max-size> is an optional indicator. Default is no limit.
BigInt	Range: +- 2^32 (+- 9223372036854775807)
Int	Range: +- 2^16 (+- 2147483647 )
SmallInt	Range: +- 2^8 (+- 32767 )
Decimal	Numerical representation with decimal part
Boolean	true or false
Date	A date with no time element
DateTime	A timestamp