Understanding business attributes in Automation Co-Pilot

Business attributes in the Automation Co-Pilot facilitate easy navigation between various requests and tasks. They can also be used for analytics (providing valuable insights) and for integration purposes (APIs and third-party applications).

Overview

Business attributes are important because they provide:
  • Improved navigation: Simplify sorting, filtering, and managing requests and tasks.
  • Improved analytics: Provide insights for better decision-making.
  • Integration: Support integration with APIs and third-party applications.
Example: Let's look at some examples to understand how business attributes are used.
  • Document Automation : If business attributes are created with learning instance identification (UUID, ID, or name), a validation user can filter validation tasks in the queue for specific learning instances or process documents that are being processed in the system for that learning instance.
  • Business user: In an invoice process, when you are creating a request, you might need approval for invoices with amounts greater than 5000 dollars. To help with the approval, an attribute named Amount can be created. This allows users to quickly search and navigate to tasks requiring approval in the task view.

A professional developer creating a process can define and set business attributes in the Process Composer for the Form Tasks. Set business attributes at both the request and task levels in the Process Composer. They are available for Form Task, Approval task, and Document Validation Task.

See Add business attribute.

Types

There are two types of business attributes:

Visible
These attributes are displayed to the user. Once added, they appear as an additional column in the request and task list views. The user can sort and filter these attributes.
Hidden
These attributes are not displayed to the user. They are used only for integration purposes (with APIs and third-party applications). Although not visible in the interface, they are searchable through API calls and are included in the REST responses.

How attributes work

Business attributes have the following characteristics:

  • They are variables that support the following value types:
    • Boolean
    • Number
    • String
    • DateTime
  • They can be either visible or hidden from users. A professional developer creating the process can set these attributes accordingly.
  • Attributes are created locally in a process, but after the process is checked in, they become global and can be shared across processes.
  • Task and request attributes have independent values.

    For example, consider an attribute Priority that is used at the request level with the value set to high. This attribute is reused at the task level with the value set to low. When the process is executed, the request view displays the Priority as high, whereas the task view displays the Priority as low.

  • Request attributes are created at the request level and can be updated at each task level.
  • The data flow for business attributes is as follows:
    • Variables can be assigned to an attribute.
    • Static values can be assigned to an attribute.
    • An attribute cannot be assigned to a variable.

Usage

Let us review how user roles use business attributes in their workflow.
Professional developer
  • Defines attributes at two levels:
    • Requests
    • Tasks
  • Assigns the type as either visible or hidden.
  • Assigns either hard-coded values or values from variables.
Business user
  • Sees the attributes assigned to tasks and requests.
  • Filters and sorts the attributes for easy navigation.
  • View attributes in an additional column in the list view.
  • Attributes are available as read-only.

Override business attributes

You can configure the option to override existing business attributes at specific nodes in a process. This enables business attributes to dynamically reflect the current state of the process.

Override can be configured in the If, Else If, Else, and Go-To nodes. Once an override is selected, the list of existing business attributes that are configured for the process is displayed. You can select the attributes that you want to override from the list. Only the value of the attributes can be overridden. The type, name, and ID cannot be edited. Once a business attribute is overridden, no new attributes can be added to the request except in the start node.

Note: If a business attribute is of Datetime type, you must provide a value when you override that attribute.