In many CRM systems, we come across the idea of templates for certain kinds of data. Say you are creating Incidents or Service Requests, and you find yourself doing many of them, and many of the fields are the same – for example a template for High Priority incidents involving Product A, because you create lots of them.
So it is not a surprise that the other day a good friend asked about the same concept in Oracle Intelligent Advisor – what happens if someone (an agent for example) finds themselves doing many of the same kinds of interview sessions. So, what can we do to help with that.
- Offer static templates for the user to select from. This is a fairly simple idea. The data for the templates is stored, for example, in an inferred entity and the values retrieved based on the selected template chosen by the user. The advantage is that you could have the list of template fields stored in an inclusion or a decision service, and let other projects pull them in. The disadvantage is that your project will carry a lot of extra overhead and the more attributes in your template, the more overhead.
- Offer a mechanism to store frequently used values in the browser.
If the user is more focused on being able to reuse the most recent values (sort of “copy from the previous interview instance”) then we will obviously need something less tied to the notion of an interview. The browser local storage becomes a useful target for this exercise. The Web Storage API will help.
Once again, assume we have three attributes to be populated from “the previous interview”. Naturally we could make it more sophisticated and let the user decide if they want to use these values. So the browser can become the storage area. This area does have advantages – it is maintained after the browser is closed (if you avoid the Session Storage and use the other, local storage), and is relatively capable of storing complex structures if the interview was more than just the few attributes shown here. It does have downsides too – the need to manage the fact that not all browsers have this kind of storage, that it is limited in size – although it should be more than enough for most applications (5mb in many cases).
Finally moving between JSON and interview attributes will require careful handling when using numbers (to ensure that formatting and separators are correctly handled) and booleans (the way Intelligent Advisor renders booleans may make it a bit harder to get the actual control to set the value).
If you are interested in the Zip Files just leave a comment. And if you use templates in another way or want to comment, please do!
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