The Item

Everything in Aras Innovator is an Item, which is an instance of an ItemType, which itself is an Item; illustrating that Aras Innovator is a self-describing system. Don’t get hung up on the self-describing nature of Aras Innovator and focus on the simplicity that everything eventually is an Item.

Items may have relationships to other Items illustrating that Items have structure. Relationships are defined by RelationshipType, which is an Item that has three properties to define the RelationshipType rule for the:

• source (parent) Item.
• related (child) Item.
• relationship Item.

When you create the RelationshipType you also create an ‘is_relationship’ ItemType which has the same name as the RelationshipType. Its id is the value of the relationship_id Property on the RelationshipType. This can get a bit confusing but simply put there is a RelationshipType/ItemType pairing to define the RelationshipType rule and an ItemType to store the relationship Items.

Relationship Items have a related_id Property of type Item, which is the related (child) Item for the relationship. The related_id Property is a link that points to an Item. The relationship Item also has a source_id Property of type Item and is the source (parent) Item for the relationship.

So, in Aras Innovator everything is an Item, and Items may have relationships, which are Items that have source and related Item Properties forming an Item configuration.

For example, an ItemType Item has Property relationships, and this Item configuration maps directly to the relational database for persistent storage of the Item instances. Every ItemType has a matching relational TABLE where the Property names are the COLUMN names.