Have a Customer Record Store and want to add other data to it

Hi 


Im new to Appian and just done the Designer course aswell as watching a few videos and turorials.

I have a CRM App where you can add a new customer, and also a see a list of companies and drill down to the record of that company.

I would like to add Interactions (meetings/calls/emails) and projects to this.  

Ive created a Interactions CDT with a companyid to link to customer.  Ive created a interface/process model for creating a new interaction, and added a interface to the customer record to see a list of the interactions for that company but not sure how to allow the user to edit these.

What is the best way of showing these on the customer record type?  Can I add a view (between Summary and News) for Interactions and for Projects (on some videos I saw Vehicles have tab for Parts and Service Requests there).

The videos on records only covered created the Summary, Main Record and Related Event but not sure on how to best linking other data to it.

Thanks

David

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  • Hi David

    So, just to help orient things:

    • a Customer is synonymous with a Company?
    • an Interaction can be of one of the following types; meeting | call | email
    • a Customer/Company can have one or more Projects?

    This will help us set out the target data model.

    Also: whilst we might want Customers/Companies and Projects to be Appian Record types, we couldn't want Interactions as such, and that Interactions would be best contained within the Customer Record?

  • Customer is a Company yes

    Interaction is some form of contact with them, so a meeting | call | email

    Customer can have one or more projects (and one or more interactions)

    From a DB sense, it seemed logical to me to have a seperate Interactions CDT that would be linked by companyid (companyid, date, type(meeting,call or email), accountmanager).  Not sure if it needs its own Record Type or can be part of the Customer Record - I think thats where I was struggling with it.

    Ive managed to add an interface to the customer record showing a list of interactions - but how do I make them editable, can I add a button that will take them to the record for that interaction?

  • Ok, good, sounds like we'er on the same page:

    • Customer/Company will be in its own database table, have its own CDT and be exposed as a Record Type in Appian
    • Project will be in its own database table, have its own CDT and be exposed as a Record Type in Appian, and have a Foreign Key which will have the value of the Primary Key of the Customer/Company.
    • Interaction will be in its own database table, have its own CDT,but NOT be exposed as a Record Type (think of Records as convenient "Points of Entry for Users" - this would simply be too large and too noisy to be a useful entry point. This will also have a Foreign key to the relevant Customer/Company
    • A Customer/Company Summary View may well hold immediately useful aggregated data, and you could add another Record View for the Interactions.
    • Both Summary and Interactions would have a shared "header" (so you know which Company/Customer you're looking at)
    • Interactions may well be a table (a!gridField()) of all Interactions, possibly summarised but selectable so you can see further detail
    • You could edit them natively in the SAIL (you can use a!writeToDatastore()) or run Related Actions to Create/Update individual Interactions. The Interactions are NOT Appian records, but ARE database table records. You just need a relevant Interface to display/edit the relevant data and means of persisting that data to the database

    Does that give you sufficient pointers to get going?

    S>

  • Hi Stewart

    Yep - I think that clarifies things for me.

    I was kind of heading in the right direction, just need to work out how to update the interactions via the interface.  

    Plenty of me to start looking into though!

    Thanks

    David

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