Designing Metadata Wizards

Before you start defining a metadata wizard in Aptify, it is important to first determine what actions the wizard will perform. The next step is then to identify how you can build the wizard to accomplish these actions using the metadata wizard infrastructure.

This section provides suggestions for how to best design your wizard.

• Consider Using a Staging Entity: The metadata wizard example in this section describes a simple wizard that operates on a single entity and its sub-types and is based on the standard Opportunities form. However, for more complicated wizard processes that involve updating multiple entities, you should consider using a staging entity. The three metadata wizards included with Aptify use staging entities to store user inputs within the wizard. The staging entity is the target entity for the wizard and the wizard's form template-based steps are tied to that entity. Then as a final step in the process, the wizard runs a process flow that takes the data from the staging entity's record and interacts with multiple entities as necessary.
  • For example, the Membership Enrollment wizard uses a MembershipEnrollment staging entity to store the user inputs, such as company data, person data, and the selected membership product. Clicking the Finish button on the wizard creates a MembershipEnrollment record and fires a process flow that uses the data from that record to create a Company, Person, and/or Order as applicable.
     
• Review Form Template and Process Flow Documentation: If you have not already, see Administering Form Templates and Managing Process Pipelines as well as this topic on creating wizards to learn about what options are available when constructing a metadata wizard.
• Review Design of Wizards: The three fully functional metadata wizards provided will serve as examples of how an organization can develop its own complex process flows. Many of the process flow steps used by these wizards are rule-based so the text of those rules are available for review by system administrators and developers.