“Take a deep breath, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again.”
— Frank Sinatra
Last time, we finished up the code for the function that runs the notice distribution process. Now we need to come up with the actual content of those notices, which should direct the recipient to some function where they can indicate the disposition of the artifacts to be reviewed. In its simplest form, this would be a binary choice between keeping or discarding each item on the review list. However, there may be other dispositions for certain configurations, and there may be a need for additional options such as This item is no longer my responsibility or Remove this account only if it has been inactive for 90 days. To support such custom responses to a review request, we would need to add yet another table to our application to store the configured response options and link them to the configuration record. This adds a little bit of complexity to the process, but I think it would be worth doing to make things as flexible and useful as possible, so let’s go ahead and build that table now.
We will call our new table Review Statement and give it four fields, the reference to the configuration, an order, and a description and short description. We will want to link this as a related table on the configuration form so that statements can be easily added when setting up the configuration.
With that out of the way, we can start to visualize the form or page that the notice recipient would use to respond to the review notification. We could list the items to be reviewed down the page, and the configured choice across the top of the page, with a checkbox for each configured statement on each line containing an item. If there is more than one item to be reviewed, then a master checkbox at the top would also be helpful, so the recipient could simply check one box for the entire list of items. On the Now Platform, there are a number of different ways to construct such a page, but I am still partial to the Service Portal, so let’s build a Portal Widget for a Portal Page.
That was the plan, anyway.
Unfortunately, I did a really stupid thing before I got a chance to get started on that. It all started when I received a notice that my instance had some technical issues and that I needed to get rid of it and start over. Fair enough. I have had that particular instance for longer than I can remember, and I am sure that it was well past time to retire it and start all over with a new one. The notice said to be sure and back everything up before I wiped it out, but I have pretty much published every single thing that I have ever worked on, so I didn’t see any point in going through that. So I didn’t. I killed the old one and started over with a new one. Easy peasy.
What I neglected to consider was that this current project that I am working on right at the moment has not gotten far enough along for me to produce any public Update Sets, so there was no back up of everything that I have done so far. Oops! So now I have to go back and recreate all of the work that has been done so far, just to catch up to this point. I don’t mind doing things; in fact, I actually enjoy most of the stuff that I do here, and I mainly do it just for the fun of it. But I absolutely hate doing things twice. Now I just have to find the motivation to go back and do all of this again, just to get back to where I already was!
