Object states & modes

Object states

Each object has one of three states at a time:

1. clean: The object hasn't changed since its last persistence. This is also the state an object has immediately after its retrieval from a repository.
2. dirty: Each significant change (at least one property has to effectively change its value) will force the object into dirty state (at least, see below). The object needs to be persisted.
3. mutated: If one of the object's content properties gets altered, the object is forced into mutated state which will also trigger draft mode (see below).

The object content consists of

• the Meta properties,
• the Domain properties and
• the object payload (if any).

Object modes

Each object has one of two modes at a time:

1. published: An object is in published mode when it has been explicitly published (resulting in the system.published property being set to a timestamp) and there hasn't occured any content change since then.
2. draft: As soon as a content change occurs (see above), the object automatically falls into draft mode. The system.published property gets unset, persisting the object will result in a new object revision. The draft mode can also be triggered explicitly.