Important

You are browsing the documentation for version 1.6 of OroCommerce, OroCRM and OroPlatform, which is no longer maintained. Read version 5.1 (the latest LTS version) of the Oro documentation to get up-to-date information.

See our Release Process documentation for more information on the currently supported and upcoming releases.

Entities

Oro applications organize information into entities, records, and properties. An entity is a collection of similar information. That information is usually stored in a separate table in the database. Each instance of this collection is a record that is stored as a row in the table. The details of each record are its properties. They are stored in the dedicated table columns. The parameters of properties are defined in the entity fields.

For instance, a contact is a system entity. When you create a new contact record in the application (e.g., a potential customer called Mary Smith), it becomes a contact record in your Oro application. Information about contact records is organized into a set of properties, such as the first name, the last name, a telephone number, etc. Every entity in Oro applications has its own properties, depending on what this entity is supposed to represent or display.

Some pieces of information are complex enough to have their own entity. For example, for each shopping list in the storefront, we need to know its unique ID (number), how many items are in the shopping list, what their total value is, and whether a purchase has been completed. The shopping entity should, therefore, have records that contain all of these properties: ID, number of items, total value, and status. When one customer has several carts, the customer record needs to be related to many different shopping list records. To achieve this, we assign one of the customer properties as a relation to shopping lists. This field saves the identifier of customer shopping lists (the shopping list field). Using this identifier, the system can find the shopping list and bind its properties to the customer. Moreover, each shopping list can have several items in it, which means that the shopping list record needs to be related to its item records as one to many.

The Entity Management topic explains how you can record, process and analyze various commerce, sales, and marketing data and activities, how all of this information is represented in Oro, and how you can manage it in your application instance.

Follow the links below to learn more:

• Create Entities
• Manage Entities
  • Edit an Entity
  • Delete an Entity
  • Manage Unique Keys
• Create Entity Fields
  • Basic Entity Field Properties
  • Advanced Entity Field Properties
  • Type-related Entity Field Properties
  • Examples of Creating Custom Entity Fields
• Manage Entity Fields
  • Edit Custom Entity Fields
  • Delete Custom Entity Fields
  • Import Fields
  • Update Schema