One of the most appreciated features of OMNIA Plaform is the possibility of handling CRUD operations on External Entities (entities that are defined and saved on other systems).

As you may know, you can also add attributes to reference an External Entity on other entities. When doing this, you have to identify from where the information is read. This information must be defined in another attribute of the same entity.

Let’s see a small example: you have an internal Entity (e.g. Employee) and an External Entity, named “Country”, that retrieves the official list of Countries from an external Data Source (e.g. GeoService).

If you want to include the country information on “Employee” entity, you’ll need two attributes:

• An attribute that identifies the Data Source instance from where data will be read. Lets call it “GeoService”
• An attribute where you can insert the Country from a list of countries, returned by the external service

You may wonder: Why do I need the attribute to identify the Data Source instance? The answer is simple: when connecting to an eternal service, we have to safely save essential information, like API Endpoints and credentials.

The relationship between these two attributes is required and set on the “Country” attribute, the one whose information is read externally, as seen below:

Now let’s see how it works when we are reading information from the External System. In this example it is shown what happens when the Data Source is incorrectly identified, and then success result when the Data Source is correct:

As you may expect, on complex applications the Data Source attribute can be programatically filled, so that the user only has to identify the entity he needs to reference.

At last, don’t forget that Reference attributes can be added to entities Forms and also to Dashboards.