Business concepts that need to be stored and accessed in our applications should be modeled as what?

When dealing with business concepts in the context of OutSystems and application development, these concepts are best modeled as entities. Entities serve as the foundational building blocks that define the data structure within the application. They encapsulate the properties and characteristics of a particular business object, allowing developers to efficiently manage how data is created, read, and updated within the application.

By modeling business concepts as entities, developers can leverage OutSystems' built-in functionalities for managing data – such as CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations – while ensuring that there is a clear representation of how different business concepts interact within the application. This aligns with best practices in software design, where modeling actual business logic and data representation should focus on practical elements like entities.

In contrast, entity diagrams and entity relationships serve as tools for visualizing and understanding how entities connect and relate but do not directly store or model business concepts themselves. Database tables are more about the physical representation of the data in a database and do not inherently encapsulate the business logic or requirements like entities do.