Create Profile Attributes

Overview

Zift PRM supports a large number of standard Entities, and you can add Custom Entities to support your own business processes. An Entity is any kind of thing that you want Zift PRM to be aware of. To be useful, an Entity needs one or more Profiles. The Profile is how you define the characteristics of Entities. For example, the Person Entity has a Job Function Profile. This means that Zift PRM can store and use a Job Function against each Person. The Job Function Profile works like a question that Zift PRM can ask about each Person: What is this Person's Job Function? For this particular Profile, the possible answers (Profile Attributes) have been pre-defined so that they can be chosen from a list. When this Person Profile is added to any screen, it will display a list of choices as check-boxes and the user can select the most appropriate choice. Alternatively, the Profile could have been created to prompt users to type in their own answer.

In other words: a Profile is a question that you can ask Zift PRM about an Entity. The Profile Attributes are the answers that you tell Zift PRM it may accept for that question. You can define any number of Profiles for an Entity and each individual instance of the Entity will inherit all of the Profiles and Profile Attributes defined for that Entity. For example, if you had a Person Profile for language preference and wanted to offer only French, English, and Spanish; for every Person, Zift PRM would accept any of those three values.

Profiles are a very powerful mechanism for controlling what Zift PRM does with Entities.

Once you have defined a Profile, you will need to create Attributes for it. You can think of a Profile as a question you ask of an Entity and attributes are the allowable answers to that question. There are two ways of adding Attributes to a Profile: this method or using the Bulk Create Profile Attributes method.

Best Practice

• Restrict the users with the rights to create Profiles: the number of Profiles can grow quickly and care should be taken to ensure that duplicates and Profiles with too-similar names are not created.
• Use Parent Profiles to group large sets of Profiles by theme. This makes it easier to find and manage Profiles.
• Avoid deleting Profiles or Profile Attributes. Instead, you should set them to Active = No. This preserves any stored data but will prevent any additional.

Before You Begin

• Log into PRM Admin.
• Create the Profile to which the Attribute will be added. The steps below assume that you have opened the desired Profile.

Note: You cannot add Attributes to Parent Profiles.

How to Create Profile Attributes

When defining an attribute, always prefix the Unique TextID fo the profile onto the Unique TextID of the attribute. This simplifies management and ensures that you do not have conflicts when creating a new profile with attributes that have a name previously used. Zift recommends using Profiles to manage non-internal users rather than User Groups.

1. From PRM Admin, click New Profile Attribute in the bottom left panel.
2. Fill in the Profile Attribute Definition Parameters as required.
3. Click Save or Save & Add New to add another new Attribute. You have now added a new Attribute to the selected Profile.