Create Profile Attributes in Bulk

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.

This task allows you to quickly add multiple Attributes to a Profile. This is useful if the Profile has many possible Attributes. Remember, a Profile is like a question that you ask of the Entity and the Attributes are all the acceptable answers. So if there are many possible answers it can be very time consuming to fully define them one-by-one. The bulk approach allows you to enter the basic values for each attribute as rows in a table or by uploading an excel spreadsheet. Only the Name value is mandatory.

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

You will need to have created a Profile that is not a Parent Profile. This procedure assumes that you have already opened the desired Profile

How to Bulk Create Profile Attributes 

1. In the Profile detail panel (bottom left), click Bulk New Profile Attributes.
2. Add the new attributes. This can be done in two ways.
   
   • Single-row entry: Enter the values manually as individual line items. Each one can subsequently be edited as you could a Profile Attribute created using the method described in how to create profile attributes.
   • Paste from Excel: You can simply copy and paste from an excel spreadsheet into the paste. This means that you can use data extracted from a database into the spreadsheet to upload very large lists.
3. Click Save.

Important: Do not include the column headings (Name, Help Text, Score) when you paste the data into the Excel paste area. If you do, only the Name values will be retained and you will need to add the Help Text and Score (if used) manually.