One way of achieving this is by taking advantage of the Aware IM feature know as business object group. Let's consider a scenario where we want to register a reseller that can carry products of different types. We could configure a couple of business objects: SoftwareProduct and HardwareProduct. Both of these objects would have some common attributes like Name, Category, Availability, etc. Each of these objects would also have attributes specific to that object. Each of the objects would have its own display form.
Next, we would configure a business object group called Product with SoftwareProduct and HardwareProduct as its members. Then we configure object Reseller with attribute Products (multiple allowed) of type Product. This completes the configuration part.
At run-time (the operation mode) on the Reseller form the user clicks on the Add New Item button for the Products attribute to register a new product for the reseller. Since Product is a group the system displays a list of group member names (SoftwareProduct and HardwareProduct) for the user to pick the desired one. Once the user makes the selection the system displays the specific form for the selected object and the user completes the data entry. The system then returns back to the Reseller form with the newly added product displayed (using the common attributes) in the Products table on the form.
If you need to add another specific product type in the future you simply configure a new object to represent this type and make the object a member of the Product group. The rest of the application will not be affected.
Please let me know if this answers your question or if you had a different scenario in mind.
Please refer to the Library sample application for an example of using object groups and to the Aware IM User Guide for more details on object groups.
