Cases received from the Online Information System are initially processed by the server before being processed by the individual projects. This allows the Administrator to do the following:
- To stop unwanted data items from appearing in the projects,
- To give more “user-friendly” names to the data items that do appear in the projects,
- To set the order of data items, which data items will in the header section of the case, and which will be highlighted,
- To centrally maintain lists or other derived attributes,
- To change the mapping of data items received from the Online Information System to data items used in the projects.
To do this, the Administrator provides an Attribute Editor (on the Tools menu) for setting up the server attribute definitions. When a case is received from the Online Information System, it is processed as follows:
- The case is parsed using the server’s attribute definitions, in particular, a name of an item in the Online Information System is mapped to a server attribute using the attribute’s external name.
- The case is then passed to the relevant project, and the server’s attributes in the case are replaced by the project’s attributes. A server attribute is mapped to a project attribute by matching the server attribute’s name with the project attributes external name.
- If a server attribute has a display type of “hidden”, it is not added to the case that is passed to the project.
- If a server attribute is a derived attribute, then it is added to the case and passed to the project as a primary attribute.