Defined Types

You can think of DefinedTypes as a kind of dictionary of possible values for a particular thing. The particular thing is the "type". In Rock, developers can define types of reusable fields and their possible values in this common place (DefinedType and DefinedValue; stored in the respective coreDefinedType and coreDefinedValue tables). For example, there is a well-known DefinedType called "Record Type" which has the following DefinedValues: Person and Business. There is another type called "Record Status" which has these values: Active, Inactive, and Pending.

NOTE: By convention, any entity that has a property that ends with *TypeId is a reference to the DefinedType.

Instead of having to create many miscellaneous entities and tables to hold these various dictionary-lookup values, developers can simply rely on DefinedTypes in the Rock framework to manage this data.