Core concepts

The building blocks of CXF — primitives, the shared model, orchestration, endpoints, and experiences — and how they fit together.

Overview

CXF gives you a small set of building blocks that combine in consistent ways. Once you know them, every feature page makes sense, because the same concepts show up again and again across modules.

There are five ideas to hold in your head:

1. Primitives — your foundational business objects: Content, Customer Data, and Commerce.
2. The shared model — the common constructs every primitive is built from.
3. Orchestration — how objects are activated and coordinated.
4. Endpoints — how you expose all of it as your own API.
5. Experiences — how it’s composed into apps and front ends.

Everything in CXF is composable: you assemble these blocks rather than build features from scratch, and you can add, change, or replace pieces without rebuilding the whole.

Primitives: Content, Customer Data, Commerce

Primitives are the foundational object types — the places your value is stored and structured.

Content

Structured content: what you publish and reuse across experiences.

Customer Data

Who you serve: Contacts, Organizations, and Segments.

Commerce

What you transact: Orders, Inventory, and Price Lists.

The important idea: these are not three separate apps. They’re interoperable primitives that share one common model — so a Workflow, a Relationship, or a View works the same way whether it’s applied to Content, a Contact, or an Order.

Each primitive is made concrete by a set of object types — the specific kinds of object you work with, like contacts, orders, or content_instances. See Object types for the full catalog and the features each one supports.

The shared model

Every primitive is built from the same set of constructs. Learn them once and you know how to read any module.

Construct	What it’s for	Reference
Properties & Attributes	The shape and fields of an object	Properties, Attributes
Relationships	How objects connect to one another	Custom Relationships, Hierarchies
Taxonomies & Tags	How objects are classified	Taxonomies, Tags
Templates & Profiles	Reusable shape and authoring	Content Templates, Profiles
Workflows	Lifecycle and operational state	Workflows
Views	How data is surfaced and presented	Views
Governance	Accountability and access	Ownership, Log

One feature, surfaced per module. Shared constructs like Profiles, Workflows, and Views are a single platform feature, not a different one per module. In the UI you configure them inside each module’s utilities (Content Workflows, Commerce Views, and so on), but that grouping is a convenience of the interface — behind it, it’s the same feature operating across every primitive.

Orchestration: putting objects in motion

Primitives hold value; orchestration activates it. This is where stored objects become real-time behavior — reacting to signals, running logic, and coordinating across primitives and channels.

Events & Automation

React to signals and run logic automatically.

Engagement Funnels

Model and drive multi-step customer journeys.

Conversations

Two-way, contextual interactions across channels.

AI Agents

Tool-enabled agents that can query and act on your data.

Endpoints: your own API catalog

CXF is API-first. You design your own Endpoints to expose primitives and orchestration as a custom RESTful API catalog, unique to your environment — governed and ready for any front end, integration, or AI system to consume.

You build and test those endpoints in the APIs Playground, aggregate their responses with Bundles, and control access with API Keys. You design and inspect the surface in Docs explorer:

Sitemaps

Organize the structure of your API surface.

Endpoints

The operations you expose over your data.

Schemas

The shape of the data each endpoint returns.

Seeds

Export and import objects across environments.

Experiences: composing the front end

Finally, experiences are assembled from everything above rather than built as standalone apps. With Journey Manager Apps, teams compose operational applications: the App Designer arranges the navigation, reusable Sections bind to Views, and layout pages and Single Record pages present and edit the data — all inheriting the relationships and governance of the objects beneath them.

Journey Manager Apps

No-code apps composed from reusable components.

How it fits together

The blocks stack into a single flow:

Primitives store and structure your value → the shared model gives them a common vocabulary → orchestration activates and coordinates them → endpoints expose them as your own API → experiences compose them into what your customers and teams actually use.

Because every piece is reusable and composable, you can start with a small slice and expand — adding constructs, automations, endpoints, or apps — without re-architecting what you already have.

Next steps

Glossary

Every term in one place.

Quickstart

Put the concepts to work and reach a first result.