Setting Initial Values of the Application

Quite often it may be necessary to 90nitialise an application with attribute values specific to a particular group of end users. For example, in a generic application for schools it may be necessary to initialise the application with values specific to a particular school, such as specify the name of the school, number of lessons per day etc.

Usually such initialisatuion on is performed by the administrator of the system, who does it once before the majority of users access the system.

Aware IM includes the predefined business object SystemSettings that can help in setting the initial values of the application. The SystemSettings business object is automatically included in all business space versions – it has a number of predefined attributes and configurators can also add their own attributes. The instance of the SystemSettings object can be created by the administrator of the system or created automatically by rules. The interesting feature of the SystemSettings object is that there can only be one instance of this object in the system – Aware IM will not let you create the second instance. This makes it possible for Aware IM to always keep this single instance in the Context and configurators can use this object anywhere in business rules or inside tags without having to worry about placing this instance in the Context first.

The SystemSettings object essentially lets you use its attributes as parameters of the application. For example, if the application that you configure includes document templates that have logos of the end users you may want to let the system administrator provide the logo of the specific end user before this user starts working with the system. You can solve this by adding LogoImage attribute of the Picture type to the SystemSettings object and design document templates to contain the reference to this attribute (<<SystemSettings.LogoImage>>) rather than providing the specific image in the document template. You will then define the menu item (for the system administrator only) that will create the instance of the SystemSettings object and bring up its form. The administrator will use this menu item and provide the specific image as the value of the “LogoImage” attribute.