Work Areas
A Work Area is designed to maintain a specific, installable, executable version of a particular life cycle stage of the whole business application supported by the Application Area. That is, a Work Area is intended to contain all the object instances required for the Application Area's business application. These may be instances of object definitions contained in the parent Application Area's library, in a Domain library, or even in another Application Area's library (though this is not recommended). See Using Work Areas.
Work Areas are the link between the LSH definitional subsystem, which consists solely of meta-data, and the actual database schemas that comprise the data repository. Definitional objects' tables, views, and packages are instantiated in the database by installing a Work Area; see Installing Work Areas. All data loading, storage and manipulation in Oracle LSH are done through installed Work Areas.
When a Definer creates a new object in a Work Area, he or she can either create an instance of an existing definition or create a new definition and instance at the same time. In this case, Oracle LSH simultaneously creates the new definition in the containing Application Area and an instance of it in the Work Area.
Work Areas have a special operation called cloning that allows you to duplicate a Work Area and all its object instances and install them to a new set of schemas for the next stage in the application's life cycle. Use this functionality to create separate development, test, and production environments. See Cloning Work Areas.
The life cycle stages are represented in Work Areas' Usage Intent attribute, whose allowed values are the same as object validation statuses (except Retired): Development, Quality Control, and Production. Oracle LSH enforces certain rules based on the Work Area's Usage Intent value, its validation status, and the validation status of all its object instances. For a detailed explanation of how to use Work Areas for different application life cycle stages, see Work Area Usage Intent and Validation Status.