Customizable Inputs
With PAW, as you define processes and tasks, some of the "settings" or "inputs" need to be changeable so that they are work on a different set of data. As an example, you are importing data from an Excel file and would like the user to select the file. You might be filtering for a certain department or client name in a database query and you want to be able to change easily.
To accomplish these, in PAW, these inputs can be made configurable.
A listing of the settings that can be changed.
In order to define the configurable input, you select the specific settings for your processing steps that need to take on the value of the input. This is shown in the screenshot below for a file path. If you are using the same "variable" for multiple processes, then you can specify the setting once and have that same value be applied in all cases.
A specific instance of the setting highlighted.
Use of Customizable Inputs
Customizable inputs can be used in multiple ways.- Modifying customizable inputs directly - You can go back to
the settings dialog and change the input and then re-run the processes
which will use the updated setting.
- Get user input as part of a task - You can have a user
specify the customizable input as part of a task. The task screenshot
below shows such a setting. In this case, when the task is run, a dialog
is provided to the user to specify the inputs.
The first step in the task is to 'Configure Inputs'.
- Calling sub-processes with specific inputs - You can
invoke sub-processes while providing input parameters to those
processes for their customizable inputs. As an example, you might
want to run a certain report for a list of project codes. Your main
process would have the project codes in a list and your sub-process
might use the project code as a configurable input which is then
tied to the project code list.
In the lower left section, you can map configurable inputs to fields in your dataset.
