Manage rules governing Activity Instance duplication

Owned by Seth Petry-Johnson
Last updated: Aug 02, 2022
3 min read

LearningBuilder allows you to prevent people from adding multiple items of the same kind on a Learning Plan. This section describes how to use the Learning Plan Task Group and Workflow Editor to define duplication rules.

Business scenario

Programs often want to restrict whether an applicant can enter more than one of a specific Activity on a Learning Plan. For example, a program may want a person to enter only one Academic Degree or may want to make sure a person does not receive credit for the same course more than once.

Keep in mind that as long as the “Add Activity” button is available, there is no way to prevent a person from adding additional items to a Task Group. This entry describes how to prevent multiple instances of the same Activity, not manage a limit to the number of Activities entered.

As of 10.10, LearningBuilder does not have a means to prevent a person from adding more than a specified number of Activities. The Requirements can ignore multiple activities but cannot prevent an Applicant from adding Activities.

Configuration Options

LearningBuilder offers several configuration options to prevent duplicates.

These include:

  • Use a pre-added Activity

  • Enforce the limitation at the Task Group level

  • Enforce the limitation at the Activity level

Use Pre-Added Activities

The easiest configuration option to prevent multiple instances of an Activity is to pre-add the Activity to the Learning Plan in question. This approach achieves the following purpose:

  • It specifies that one and only one of the Activity is necessary

  • Avoids the step to require the Applicant to add the Activity

To enforce that the Activity is required, use the “Required” property of the pre-added Task.

Marking a Pre-Added Task as “Required”

You can use this approach if there is more than one option, as long as the number of options is not too unwieldy (i.e., 3-4).

To use this approach where more than one option is available, pre-add each Activity as a Task.

To enforce requirements, use the Task Group “Complete Any” (1) setting.

Task Group level requirements

This approach does not work when:

  • The person is allowed to choose among multiple options

  • You need a person to complete one and only one option

Task Group restrictions

If you need to allow choices but want to make sure the person does not choose the same thing more than once, you can prevent a Task Group from allowing a person to add an Activity that is already present elsewhere in the system.

You have the choice to limit the Activity as follows:

  • For the current Learning Plan in a Complete Status

  • Anywhere in the system in any status 


The greyed out checked box references the Complete Activity Entity workflow, below.

At the Entity level

You may indicate that a particular Activity can never be present twice in the system using an Entity setting.

On the Entity Details screen, you can set the "Allow Multiple Instances" to “No” if you want the system to prevent multiple instances without needing to check each Task Group. This option is especially valuable when the same Activity is likely to be selected in multiple Learning Plans. 

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