Database Administration Entity Interface Reference
- Last Updated: January 26, 2026
- 2 minute read
- OpenEdge
- Version 12.8
- Documentation
This appendix provides a reference to the entity interfaces that support the ABL API for Multi-tenant and Table Partitioning Maintenance. For more information on this API, see ABL API for Data Admin, Multi-tenant and Table Partition Management.
Additionally, the appendix also lists the entity interfaces that support the ABL API for Dynamic Data Masking (DDM).
For more information on DDM and its API, see Introduction to Dynamic Data Masking and IDataAdminService interface respectively.
The entity interfaces provide public access to classes that map to entities in the database through properties that correspond to key fields. Some properties have more user friendly names than the database field they are mapped to, while others have names that are similar to the database field names, but without underscores and hyphens. In some cases, properties are implemented with a different data type than the underlying data source. Fields that represent foreign keys for relationships are implemented as objects.
Each interface instance has a key that uniquely identifies the
entity in the API and maps it to the corresponding row in the database.
The API attempts to expose the humanly readable character key whenever
possible, but internal IDs are also typically exposed as properties.
Some entity interfaces, like IPartition, do not
expose the internal key.
All entity class implementations override the Equals( ) method
to account for the fact that different object instances can represent
the same database data and return TRUE if the passed
object represents the same database record and is retrieved by the
same service.
All entity interfaces (and classes) inherit (or implement) the IDataAdminElement interface,
and in some cases, other interfaces. In the sections that describe
these interfaces, the interface names are referenced without their
containing package, which is OpenEdge.DataAdmin for
entity interfaces and OpenEdge.DataAdmin.Lang.Collections for entity
collection interfaces (documented in Database Administration Entity Collection Interface Reference).
The following sections have code examples that show how to use
the interfaces and classes with the service. Note that these code
examples largely assume the USING statement declarations
for OpenEdge.DataAdmin.* and OpenEdge.DataAdmin.Lang.Collections.*, and
the definition and instantiation of the DataAdminService (service)
as shown in Instantiating a DataAdminService.