BMC Remedy AR System application components

This topic introduces the main components of an BMC Remedy AR System application.

• Form — The main BMC Remedy AR System application component that users interact with is a form. Each form is composed of fields. Forms display information in fields. A field can be a unit of information, such as an employee's last name, or it can be a visual element, such as a line or a box. You can design different field arrangements, or views, of forms for different user functions.
  Each data field on a form has a set of properties that define the size of the field, the type of data that the field stores, and any access permissions. There are also several fields that don't contain data but instead organize data or improve the appearance of the screen: active link control fields (buttons and hotlinks), table fields, trim fields, and panel fields. Fields from existing forms can be combined into join forms.
  Adding fields to a form causes the AR System server to create columns in a database table. When a user fills in the fields and saves the data, the system creates a request to track. In database terms, each request is a record.
  You can bundle related forms into an application. For example, a human resources application might include forms for basic employee data, health benefits, and salary information. You can deploy the application to multiple servers to make it accessible to employees in different locations. You can also display your application on the web to allow access from a browser on any platform, as shown in the following figure.
  
  Console application viewed in a browser 
  (Click the image to expand it.)
  
   

• Menu — Menus are lists that you create to guide the user in entering information in fields on forms. Menus are attached to fields on forms as fill-in aids. They can provide suggestions for entering data into a field, or can be mandated as the only possible choices. Menus can be statically defined, dynamically built by querying other AR System database tables, read from text files written by other applications, or created from SQL queries to external databases. A menu can contain all possible values for a field, or it can contain some possible values, enabling users to enter text that is not on the menu. You can design dynamic menus, which change their contents based on the data already entered in the form. See Field menus.

• Workflow — While forms provide the mechanism to structure data capture and menus offer options for specific field data, additional components (active links, filters, and escalations) act on the data to automate business processes, or workflow. These components trigger actions in response to execution options that you define. In BMC Remedy AR System, workflow generally refers to the operations triggered by these components, but BMC Remedy AR System also addresses the broader meaning of workflow, which consists of the processes that your organization uses to run itself. See Workflow overview.
• Association — If you want to create a relationship between two different forms in BMC Remedy AR System, you can create an association. Association is a new object added in BMC Remedy Developer Studio which is used for creating relationships. These relationships are used in various BMC applications.