What is the use of "Variable is hidden from parent processes and reports"
Discussion posts and replies are publicly visible
Hi Swetha
My understanding (and I'm prepared to be educated by those who may have a deeper insight here) is that if you were to consider a true Object Oriented language your Objects would have 'Getters' and 'Setters' through which the internal state of an Object can be determined, but that the internal state of an object should reside in 'private variables'. So you can consider setting the 'hidden' attribute of a process variable to the equivalent of a 'private variable' of an Object.
By default this attribute is NOT set, and so a new pv! is thus by default a candidate 'Getter' and/or 'Setter'.
Having said that, I've never (in my 7 years at Appian) seen this actively used.
Stewart
I've used the feature a very few times, mainly to hide temporary and/or troubleshooting PVs that would never be relevant to a parent process; the problem then becomes, you can't even pull up the PV on a process instance report, which can be an important use case for troubleshooting PVs. So instead I usually name them with an obnoxious pre-tag like "TEMP_" or "TROUBLESHOOTING_", to signal that they shouldn't be referenced by a parent process in any way, and subject to being deleted prior to a production push.