The Master Data Pattern
The EARP systems are designed to deal with people and things. These people can be customers, vendors, or employees. The things can be the G/L Accounts, Items, Fixed Assets, or Loaners.
We will refer to people as the Person Master Data, and to Things as the Product Master Data.
Technical description
The Master Data tables have a single Primary Key of the Code length as 20. This code field is typically and automatically determined using the Number Series Pattern, although this is optional. To have a more humanly readable way to find records in the table, each Master Data has two text-fields of length 50, and a code-field of length 50.
The Number Series Pattern will be discussed in Chapter 3, Design Patterns.
The following diagram explains how to implement the Master Data Pattern:
For the People Master Data, these text fields are called Name and Name 2. The code fields is named Search Name. The Product Master Data has text...
