The Tideway Pattern Language, TPL, is used to describe applications, products and other real-world entities that have been modeled within Foundation. The core aim of the language is to make it easy to describe the most common structures to be modeled, while remaining powerful enough to describe the vast majority of modeling situations.

The syntax and semantics of the pattern language are described here. This is a reference guide, not a tutorial. If you are new to TPL, you should start with the introduction to How to Model your Business Applications.

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Major sections

• What's new in TPL – a summary of new features in TPL 1.2/Foundation 7.2.
• TPL file structure – this section provides a description of TPL files and contains information on declarations and data types.
• Import – this section provides information on importing TPL from other modules into your TPL file.
• Metadata – metadata is used to provide additional information on the entity being modeled.
• Pattern – patterns are used to describe the structures of applications, products and other modelled entities, and encapsulate rules about how to identify them. The Pattern section contains most of the detail you will need to write patterns and is divided into the following sections:
  • Overview – introduces patterns.
  • Constants – describes the use of constants in patterns.
  • Triggers – describes the way to define the conditions in which the body of the pattern is executed.
  • Body – describes the body section of the pattern. This is where the main work is done.
  • Functions – functions to manipulate data and perform discovery.
  • Removal – describes how rules are specified for the removal of nodes
• Pattern Configuration – permits end-user modification of pattern configuration parameters.
• Table – this section describes the use of lookup tables in TPL.
• Identify – identify tables are used to annotate matching nodes with particular values.
• Definitions – used to define functions for integration with external systems.
• Node Names Types and Keys – guidelines for naming nodes and giving them keys.
• TPL Keywords
• TPL Grammar
• String Escape Characters

Typographical conventions

The description of the Tideway Pattern Language uses a number of typographical conventions to distinguish items, as follows:

• fixed pitch font – TPL code fragments.
• italic fixed pitch – Items to be replaced in code fragments.
• bold fixed pitch – TPL keywords.
• [items in square brackets] – optional items.