Linked Attribute Groups
Overview
Attribute Groups are a configuration accelerator designed to simplify configuration in a common business case.
For instance, consider a “Demographics Change” process in a licensure program. In this scenario, the licensing program collects demographic data about their Practitioners such as gender, ethnicity, etc. Those demographic details are stored as Member Role attributes.
Those demographic details may be tracked in the license registration, so Practitioners cannot freely change the values on their own. They must go through a formal process to request a change so that the official licensure record is kept up-to-date.
A common approach to implementing that process is to create a Learning Plan Instance for collecting the new data from the Practitioner, reviewing it, and then approving or rejecting the change.
Under this approach, Attributes on the Learning Plan Instance hold the “in process” data, such as a newly requested gender change. The requested changes can be tracked without having any impact on the “official” data stored on the Member Role.
Once the change is approved, the values are copied from the Learning Plan Instance onto the Member Role to officially “apply” the change.
If there is a small number of Attributes to synchronize then this is easily configured using the "Update Workflow Instance Attribute" Behavior.
However, the one-by-one configuration quickly gets tedious if there are a larger number of Attributes to keep synchronized, or if the synchronization process can be triggered from multiple applications or steps within an application.
The “Attribute Groups” feature allows those relationships to be configured just once, and then synchronized using a single Behavior.
Creating an Attribute Group
Attribute Groups are managed at Admin → Workflows → Linked Attributes
Each Group consists of one or more pairs of Attributes, one on a Member Role and its corresponding Attribute on a Learning Plan Instance.
The Group does not specify which “direction” values are being copied; it only maps Attributes from one entity to another.
The copying of values is triggered by the “Synchronize Linked Attributes” Behavior.