About Data Instance Behaviors

The Data Instance behavior differs significantly from all other behavior types in that it does not define any behavior. All other behavior types define some sort of action to be performed; for example, a calculation or a lookup. You can use a Data Instance behavior to obtain data that is not included in the order data and make that data available to other behaviors. There are two methods for obtaining the data for the Data Instance behavior:

You can use a data provider, which is an adapter that can retrieve data in an XML format from external systems. Design Studio delivers several built-in data provider types intended to retrieve external XML instances from specific sources, such as an Objectel server extension or a SOAP web service. Additionally, you can create your own custom data provider. See "Working with Data Providers" for more information.
You can statically define data inline in XML format (or create an XQuery statement to retrieve an XML document) on the Data Instance Behavior Properties Data tab. For example, consider that you are creating a data instance behavior that will eventually retrieve a list of available ports from your inventory system. Early in the development cycle, the API required to connect to the inventory system may not be implemented correctly or completely. You can use the inline feature to statically define a dummy payload that represents the data that you anticipate will be returned from the inventory system to test the behavior functionality.

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See OSM Concepts for more information about behavior default values, inheritance, and declarative syntax.