A Developer’s Guide to Planning Appian Record Types

 

Before you jump straight into creating record types in Appian, taking a step back to plan is a crucial step that can save you a lot of time. To understand how this works in practice, let's follow the developers at a fictional company, Acme Auto, as they plan a fleet management application.

When planning your record types, you need to answer critical questions about your data model and how that data will ultimately be used. Here is a breakdown of the key areas you should focus on:

1. Define the Data Model and Relationships The first step is figuring out your entities, your data fields, and how everything is related. At Acme Auto, the application revolves around managing fleet vehicles, along with the maintenance requests and comments associated with them.

• Existing vs. New Data: The developers know that vehicle data (like year, make, and model) already exists, while maintenance data will need to be newly generated by users.
• Lookup Records: For static values that are standard across vehicles—such as condition, status, and category—they plan to use related lookup record types.
• Relationships: They also map out the relationships: a single vehicle can have multiple maintenance requests, and both vehicles and requests can have multiple comments.

2. Align with Business Processes and Events Next, you must dig deeper into how this data fits into your actual business processes. Thinking about your processes ensures you identify all the necessary record fields. For example, if a maintenance request requires approval from a supervisor, your maintenance record type will specifically need a field for "approval status," powered by another lookup record type.

Additionally, you need to plan for business event history tracking. By capturing key milestones—such as when maintenance is requested, completed, or canceled—you can store these as record events. This data is invaluable for later analysis to understand performance and pinpoint inefficiencies in your workflows.

3. Design the User Experience: Navigation, Actions, and Views Data is only useful if users can interact with it effectively. You need to ask yourself: How will users navigate the data, and what views do they need?

• Navigation and Views: Acme Auto employees (registrars, supervisors, and mechanics) will start with a general list of vehicles. From there, they need to drill down into summary views that display all the details about a specific vehicle and its maintenance records.
• Actions: Users will need to execute specific actions based on the record. For vehicles, this means adding, updating, and deleting. For maintenance, actions will include requesting maintenance, creating estimates, and starting, pausing, or completing the work.
• Ad-Hoc Reporting: Administrators will need the ability to create ad-hoc reports on vehicles and maintenance, which indicates that these record types should be made available in Appian's Process HQ.

4. Establish Security and Reporting Finally, security is an essential part of the planning phase. You must determine who is allowed to see specific data, views, and actions. For Acme Auto, all users can view the vehicle and maintenance data. However, actions are strictly role-based: only registrars can add or delete vehicles, and only mechanics and supervisors are allowed to update maintenance requests.

Furthermore, consider the specific insights different users will want to see. Registrars, for instance, will need high-level reports on the makeup of the fleet, as well as detailed metrics like the number of maintenance requests submitted for a given vehicle.

The Payoff By thoroughly mapping out your data models, process relationships, user interactions, and security requirements, you ensure a solid foundation for your application. This kind of upfront planning will give you a massive jump start to your Appian development!