Working with Associations

If users from a combination of different groups and roles will need access to a business object or set of objects, you can create an association. Associations are not supported by the baseline behavior of the apps and require extensive customization to policies to be used.

Associations allow defining signature definitions such as “a Manager in the Products group AND a member of the Engineering group OR a member of the Design group OR a Vice-President."

This page discusses:

Signature Definitions

Suppose you are trying to define policy signature requirements that would govern “Software Development” business objects. Suppose the Approve signature definition for promotion of business objects from the state “Design” to the state “Implement” requires that the person must be a Project Leader and member of the Kernel Engineering group.

Without an association definition, you would have to hard code names of individuals who are Project Leaders and members of the Kernel Engineering group. However, if the number of individuals with such group/role assignments is large, you would have to manually enter all such names, which could be error prone. Also this signature definition would have to be maintained as group/role assignments change.

With associations, you could define the following: 

Project Leader and Kernel Engineering
All individuals who are assigned a role of Project Leader and belong to the Kernel Engineering group.

Another example of an association definition: 

Designer or Project Leader and Kernel Engineering or Management

With this association definition, the following individuals would have signature authority:

  • All individuals who are assigned a role of Designer.
  • All individuals who are assigned a role of Project Leader who also belong to the Kernel Engineering group.
  • All individuals who belong to a group called Management.

Notify

The Notification facility sends messages to a group of people when a business object enters a new state.

Suppose you want to remind all Quality Assurance people associated with the testing of Assembly 101 that the customer requested an extra test. You could accomplish this by notifying the entire Quality Assurance Group, but the message would unnecessarily go out to people who did not work on Assembly 101.

You could also accomplish this by notifying the entire Assembly 101 Group, but the message would unnecessarily go out to people who do marketing, documentation, and so on, for Assembly 101.

The association feature allows you to more effectively control the recipients of the notification message. You can send the message to only the desired set of people using the following association definition: Quality Assurance and Assembly 101. The only people who receive the message are those in both the Quality Assurance and Assembly 101 Groups.