A data store may contain many diverse types of objects. The repository is not the data store itself; instead, it is a collection of JavaBeans whose properties can be found and stored in the data store. The mission of the repository is to provide a mechanism to retrieve the data elements and a run-time representation of the available meta information about each object. This goal is achieved through three main conceptual parts of the Repository API:
For example, a repository might track elements of an organization. Each employee would have a corresponding repository item, as would each department. An employee item descriptor would specify all of the properties that an employee repository item could possess; a department item descriptor would specify all the possible properties of a department. An application can build queries that return the appropriate employee or department repository items as they are needed by the application.
