Help needed with design decision on references

ckacoroski

Hi,

My app will have accounts and groups. These are updated automatically from an external system. Problem is that I need to override the updates and/or add additional accounts to a group or groups to an account. For example:

External System: AcctA is in groups G1 and G2

AwareIM Application: AcctA in in group G3 and removed from G1

End result is that operator sees that AcctA is in Groups G2 and G3 and can run a report/query to see what things were overridden so we can fix the external system.

I would like to use references, but I am stuck with the overrides. For non-reference attributes it was easy as I just created another attribute for that blocked the external system from doing updates.

The only ideas I have now are:

Have AwareIM completely replace the autogenerated data and used a second attribute to show it was overridden. Only issue is that if AcctA belonged to 30 groups and the operator wanted to remove AcctA from one group, they would have to select the other 29 groups which is a pain.
Keep 4 attributes for the groups. First attribute is the references from the external system, second is the references added by AwareIM, the third is the references removed by AwareIM and the fourth is the combination of the previous three (calculated by rules). This seems to be a lot of work.

Any other ideas?

tford

Hi ski,

Sounds like a challenging application.

You might try something like this:

5 BOs:
1-Group_External
2-Account_External
***References between #1 & #2 as you suggested

3-Group_Aware
4-Account_Aware
***References between #3 & #4 as you suggested

5- Difference
Attributes of Difference BO:
a-Group_External
b-Account_External
c-Group_Aware
d-Account_Aware
e-Explanation

Instances of Difference BO would be created by rules that inspect the info in BO's #1 through #4. Attributes 5a-5d could be optional & all that info could be built into a Difference.Explanation attribute that is built by the various rules which identify the differences. As you mentioned in your #2, the rules will be a lot of work, but I don't see any simpler way to approach it.

Part of the design would depend on whether ENTIRELY new accounts or groups can exist on Aware that do not exist on the external system.

It would be great if you could share with the forum how you solved it so we can all learn from your experience.

Tom

ckacoroski

Here is the solution I came up with:

AwareIM Objects:

IntAcct with Groups_add, Groups_del, Groups, and Groups_auto reference attributes to the groups object. Only the groups attribute is a matching attribute, all others are not (e.g just one way from the IntAcct to the Group).

ExtGroups that reads from an external mysql table that has groupname and acctid in it.

Rules on IntAcct like so:

Override to delete auto_generated groups:
If Groups was added to IntAcct.Groups_del then remove AddedGroups from IntAcct.Groups
else if Groups was removed from IntAcct.Groups_del then insert RemovedServices in IntAcct.Groups

Override to add in additional groups:
If Groups was added to IntAcct.Groups_add then insert AddedGroups in IntAcct.Groups
else if Groups was removed from IntAcct.Groups_add then remove RemovedServices from IntAcct.Groups

Autogenerated groups checking on overrides:
if Groups WAS ADDED TO IntAcct.Groups_auto AND Not (AddedGroups in IntAcct.Groups_del)
then INSERT AddedGroupss in IntAcct.Groups
else if Groups was removed from IntAcctg.Groups_auto and not (RemovedGroups in IntAcct.Groups_add)
then remove RemovedGroups from Staff.Groups

To stop wonderful users from breaking things🙂:
if Groups was added to IntAcct.Groups_add and AddedGroups in IntAcct.Groups_del then report error 'Cannot have same group in both add and delete override'
else if Groups was added to IntAcct.Groups_del and AddedGroups in IntAcct.Groups_add then report error 'Cannot have same group in both add and delete override'

This seems to work ok once I made the rule for IntAcct.Groups_auto a priority 60 so it runs first. The nice thing about this solution is that in the GUI presentation, I put the groups onto a different tab and all the user has to do is to add or remove the group they need to override. Also, because only the IntAcct.Groups attribute is matched with the Groups object, everything it is updated, the Groups object for that group is automagically updated so the groups are kept up-to-date. The downside is that you cannot add accts to a group from the group object, you have to add groups to an account via the overrides or else this will get all mucked up.

Any ideas and comments are welcome and appreciated.

ski