Understanding business attributes - Business attributes are custom fields that developers define on requests and tasks to support navigation, analytics, and integration with APIs and third-party applications.

Overview

Business attributes provide the following benefits:

• 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.

The following examples show how business attributes are used in practice:

• 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.
• Business user: In an invoice process, when creating a request that requires approval for invoices greater than $5,000, an attribute named Amount can be created. This allows users to search and navigate to tasks requiring approval.

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.

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

The following describes how each role uses business attributes:

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.
• Access attributes in read-only mode.

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. After 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. After a business attribute is overridden, no new attributes can be added to the request except in the start node.