Data object

How to read it

BPMN 2.0.2 says data objects show what activities need in order to be performed and what they produce. One can stand for a single object or a collection, which the standard marks with three short bars. A state can be written after the name in square brackets, such as Order [approved]; Matteo Magnani and Danilo Montesi of the University of Bologna describe data objects as rectangles with a folded corner where a state such as approved or purchased can be given. A dotted association joins the data object to the step that uses or creates it.

Also searched as: bpmn data object, data object symbol, document bpmn, folded page bpmn.

Data object or data store

Data kept beyond one run of the process is a data store, a separate BPMN symbol; Montali’s slides describe it as a container for persisted data objects.

Look-alikes

A flowchart document has a wavy bottom edge where the data object has a folded corner. In a data flow diagram, stored data is a data store.