Work With Business Analytics Attributes

You use Business Analytics attributes to provide credentials or other runtime inputs for apps, mashables or mashups.You can also use attributes to provide additional meta data for artifacts. Common examples include information for the current user, such as a credential for a mashable, shared information that should be used for all contexts, such as an application ID that should always be used for a specific mashable, or information from a previous response that is specific to the current transaction or session.

Business Analytics attributes can be defined for these contexts:

User Attributes: are defined by each user as part of their profile in Business Analytics and saved in the Business Analytics User Repository. See Manage Your Business Analytics User Attributes for more information.

You can also choose to expose attributes from the Business Analytics User Repository as Business Analytics user attributes. You can expose attributes from the default User Repository or from your LDAP Directory, if Business Analytics is configured to use LDAP. See Expose User Attributes from the User Repository in Business Analytics for more information.

At runtime, the Business Analytics Server first checks the Business Analytics user attributes for the current user to resolve any references to Business Analytics attributes used in a request. If there is no matching user attribute for the current user, the Business Analytics Server uses the matching Business Analytics global attribute to resolve the attribute value before processing the request.

Global Attributes: can be used to define a default or shared value for a Business Analytics user attribute. This can be used for all users or just for those users that have not defined a specific value.

Global attributes can also be used to define any common value that should be used in many contexts. See Manage Business Analytics Global Attributes for instructions on creating global attributes.

Session Attributes: are data that is available for one user session. They can be defined or updated in these ways:

From data in a mashable or mashup response. These Business Analytics session attributes are defined in requests using a Business Analytics Header/Parameter. For more information, see Map Business Analytics Attributes to Artifact Input Parameters.

Request Attributes: can be used to refer to HTTP headers or cookies for a specific request. For more information, see Map Business Analytics Attributes to Artifact Input Parameters.

Artifact Attributes: are additional meta data that you provide for individual apps, mashables or mashups. See Manage Artifact Attributes for more information.