Asset Types

Asset Types are rather like LDAP's objectClasses, in that more than one can be applied to any Asset, they are cumulative on that asset, and define what fields the asset can/must have. Unlike LDAP, though, Asset Types imbue an Asset with behaviour. For this reason, type order matters.

An Asset Type defines several key properties:

Attributes

Attributes can be thought of as meta-data-intensive field definitions; they convey not only the name and data type of the data to be stored in corresponding Asset instances, but also how to display, edit and validate that data.

Relations

Relations indicates how this asset type relates to other asset types. These types can be ownership, parent-child, or possibly others as yet undetermined. It also indicates how and when related assets should be cached.