Glossary introduction

Operations on glossary assets (glossaries, categories, terms).

Glossaries are a container for both terms and categories

Terms and categories can only exist within a glossary. So a glossary must first exist, before you can create a term or category. This also means that if you delete a glossary, all of the terms and categories within that glossary are also deleted.

Note as well that terms are not contained within categories. Categories are simply a mechanism to organize terms in Atlan. This means that deleting a category will not delete the terms related to it.

erDiagram
    Glossary ||--o{ GlossaryCategory : contains
    Glossary ||--o{ GlossaryTerm : contains

Each glossary object mostly behaves like other assets in Atlan. You can create, retrieve, update, delete, restore, view history, search, and combine operations using the same patterns as for any other asset.

Unique characteristics of glossary objects

There are, however, a few points that are unique to glossary objects compared to other asset types:

• The qualifiedNames of all glossary objects are a hashed string. This is not human-readable. All other asset types have qualifiedNames that are human-readable. We have provided helper methods specifically for retrieval of glossary assets by their human-readable names.
• When updating a contained glossary object (term or category), you must provide details about the parent glossary of that object. You can update all other asset types without re-specifying their parent object.

As a result, the creator() and updater() builder methods for terms and categories require extra parameters to specify the glossary.

The other difference that exists in interacting with glossaries is the common need to traverse their hierarchy of categories.

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