Business rules are used to manipulate data, provide data integrity, and impose restrictions on or provide default values for specific attributes according to business or organisational requirements. Developers have the ability to specify the transaction object by selecting a master entity and any number of detail entities which may be nested. The repository is a significant enabler of this, as is the central definition and storage of business rules. Support for object-oriented techniques is reflected in both the form building environment and the programming language, provided as a means to generate additional functionality to objects on forms. The forms building environment provides all the expected functionality of a mature tool.
Developers can construct forms rapidly without recourse to code.
Form styles can be established to define the background, and to determine which controls should be pre-loaded onto the form. One of the principal construction units of a form is a Dataframe. These provide a view of a database table, a form can contain multiple Dataframes, each associated with multiple tables. A full set of run-time functions for every entry and report form are provided, removing the need for developers to undertake the often complex and time consuming process of creating these functions for every new form. Testing can be carried out at virtually any point in the development of a form, simply by switching to form test mode.