The Party entity is a complex foundation entity, used to support Customers and Suppliers in a unified way.

At the "heart" of the entity is the dbParty table - not to be confused with the Party Entity.


Every Customer or Supplier has one [and only one] record in this table and can have many Party Branches  - dbParty_Branches.

For simplicity reasons - in v3 - no RI constraints  are forced for this relation.


  • dbParty.nPartyPK is the PK of the dbParty table - it is an 8 byte int [auto],
  • all other fields are self explanatory or are documented in their functional area.

Note: a Party entity can be a Customer and a Supplier at the same time, depending on the Boolean fields bCustomer and bSupplier.

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"Around" this entity, are various Dimension tables - like dbPartyCategory - connected by FKs, with or without RI constraints.

You can find more information about the entity in the WX Analysis [or the SQL Schema].


* Not using RI Constraints, for some "virtual links", gives a programmer a lot of flexibility - especially in the Query Editor.

But ta RI constraint must then be implemented in code ..


*Paradigm of Virtual link and RI

If you Delete a dbParty record you must delete, with code, any "linked" dbParty_Branches.

Additions and Edits are not affected. 



Simple Diagram of Party Entity


* the above diagram is NOT complete - for more information see the database schema.