Rock U - Rock Fundamentals - What is an Entity

Transcribed Video Content

A person, a group, a campus, a communication. Under the hood, these are all the same thing in Rock, an entity. Once you understand this one pattern, a lot of features in Rock will make more sense to you. To illustrate what entities are, we'll use an analogy that really makes sense here, and that's junk drawers. So imagine you have a junk drawer in your home and it's the day to finally organize it. Something you'd probably do to make it easier for yourself is start picking things that are related and putting them into different categories. And as you build these categories, you can start dropping things into boxes and each kind of thing gets its own box such as writing instruments, money, nails and screws, and then it's easier to manage and understand what's in that junk drawer. Now each box and Rock is an entity. This is basically what we've done with entities is there's all kinds of information properties and attributes and to shape those into something that makes sense and is consistent, we use entities. And some great examples of entities are a person, a group, a financial transaction. You'll really be amazed by how many things in Rock are simply an entity under the hood. And here's a really good example. These are some entities you'll see most. Again, you see person group, attendance, workflow, defined value, and attribute value. Now those things that we've placed within the box are things properties, which on a person would be a first name, last name, email, or birth date, and then attributes as well, which these are things that you can optionally add on to extend an entity in Rock and make it more how your organization would use that entity. Entities are the shared building block underneath each part of Rock. Once you understand this pattern internally, new parts of the system will feel familiar to you instead of foreign.