The Data Model Resource Book, Volume 3: Universal Patterns for Data Modeling

Silverston c06.tex V2 - 11/21/2008 3:09am Page 280

280 Chapter 6 ■ Status: The States of Data

documentation, such as state transition diagrams, instance diagrams, and/or

worked examples. Also, this pattern does not maintain different attributes,

relationships and/or rules for different status types.

Status Category Pattern

In the previous sections we referenced different state diagrams that showed

basic states for ORDER (Figure 6-1), SHIPMENT (Figure 6-10), and WORK

EFFORT (Figure 6-11). E ach of these different diagrams illustrated a flow

where the different states were connected to each other. Not only were the

states connected to each other but they were also members of a finite set.

In other words, each state may have been directly related to one or more

other states, but all of the states were contained in a grouping (aggregation or

hierarchy) of states. For example, ‘‘Order Received,’’ ‘‘Order Entered,’’ ‘‘Order

Confirmed,’’ ‘‘Order Cancelled,’’ and ‘‘Order Closed’’ were all members of

an order fulfillment process. However, it is possible that orders have other

processes in addition to the order fulfillment process. For example, orders

may have an order scheduling process with status types of ‘‘On Schedule,’’

‘‘Behind Schedule,’’ and ‘‘Overdue’’. In fact, orders (or any entity) may have

many different processes supporting them and thus may have different sets,

or categories of status types. The ...