The data services layer is where Process Designer interacts with the objects in your host application. It has five basic operations: create, read, update, delete (CRUD), and query. These must be implemented by a host provider so that the guides can operate on objects during runtime. These data services are only used at guide runtime to read and alter data.

Process Designer only attempts to call read, update, and query operations upon your data service.

The data service supports batch requests for each operation in order to optimize the number of hits against the host application.

A core concept for objects is that each object instance has an

ObjectId

that uniquely identifies it, and it may have an

ObjectName

that is used to render it on the screen in place of the

ObjectId

. In the sample message shown in the Read and Query operation discussions, you'll notice that the

ObjectName

is always returned regardless of whether the request message specified that the field should be returned.