entitylevel

Entitylevel is a design and modeling concept that concentrates on entities—objects with a persistent identity and lifecycle—as the primary units of analysis in software systems. It treats entities as the central building blocks around which data, behavior, and relationships are structured.

In an entitylevel approach, models emphasize the entity's identity, its core attributes, its relationships to other entities, and the invariants that must hold across the entity's lifecycle. This perspective prioritizes business-relevant objects over individual attributes or isolated records, aligning software structures with domain concepts.

Key aspects include a stable identity (often a unique identifier), defined relationships (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many), lifecycle states (created, active, archived), and the boundaries that govern persistence, validation, and business rules. Entities are commonly organized into aggregates or similar groupings to manage consistency and transactional scope within larger systems.

Entitylevel is common in domain-driven design and systems architecture where business objects drive development. It supports clear API design, consistent persistence mappings, and modular boundaries such as aggregates and bounded contexts. By focusing on entities, teams can reason about data integrity, versioning, and inter-entity operations in a cohesive way.

Example: in a customer management system, the Customer entity has id, name, contact information, and related addresses. It relates to Order entities; operations on Customer may trigger domain events and ensure invariants like unique email addresses. Tradeoffs include potential complexity and heavier data models, performance considerations for large graphs of entities, and the need for careful boundary design to avoid leakage across services. Related concepts include domain-driven design, entity-relationship modeling, aggregates, bounded contexts, and object-relational mapping.