The technical documentation of such a complex application as Collibra is surely a daunting task, and already provides a wealth of information. There are a few topics that are missing, do anyone know where to get that information? setting outputCreateTermId on a workflow to create an asset will make a magic (or two) popup appear email templates in general email templates are embedded into jars, but you can override them with customization. Which are those templates? java/rest APIs new endpoints:...

Technical documentation: missing sections, "magic" and new releases | Product Q&A

Technical documentation: missing sections, "magic" and new releases

The technical documentation of such a complex application as Collibra is surely a daunting task, and already provides a wealth of information.
There are a few topics that are missing, do anyone know where to get that information?

setting outputCreateTermId on a workflow to create an asset will make a magic (or two) popup appear
email templates in general
email templates are embedded into jars, but you can override them with customization. Which are those templates?
java/rest APIs new endpoints: There is no way to know which new methods have been added. e.g. When was setAssetAttributes(SetAssetAttributesRequest request) added?? Did I miss that?
storing groovy code in a groovy-lib folder in your customization backup automatically import those functions into all your workflow script tasks
Catalog breadcrumbs: nothing explains that there is a specific presentation breadcrumb System > Database > Schema > Table
Special styles for special assets: Business process, Data Set, etc. After customization it becomes impossible to know which new features have been added to Collibra.
You can add the number of lines you want in the Console logs so that you can see more than 200 lines.

What are the nice features you discovered by yourself and are nowhere in the documentation
Is it possible to add those topics to the documentation? Including additions in the What's new section of the release notes would be awesome.
@Bridget.Heaton This forum is awesome to chat and exchange, would it be possible to also extend it with a kind of knowledge base that Collibra customers can crowdsource? Or that can be curated by Collibra based on customer input?

arthurburkhardt

Posted 5 years ago · Edited 1 year ago·Last reply 3 years ago

28 comments

jevgenijsjelistratovs

·5 years ago · Edited

This whole thread should go into developer portal

rostislav

·5 years ago · Edited

@jj.okera.com, some of these will definitively make their way the re. This thread is on my watchlist.

arthurburkhardt

OP5 years ago · Edited

Soooo… Did anyone notice the very cool methods added to the AssetApi class?
I’m talking about:

setAssetAttributes(SetAssetAttributesRequest request)
setAssetRelations(SetAssetRelationsRequest request)
setAssetResponsibilities(SetAssetResponsibilitiesRequest request)
setAssetTags(SetAssetTagsRequest request)

Those new methods (introduced in… 2021.05? 2021.04? basically make all the “upsert” functions obsolete.
Has there been ANY communication on the topic?

Example

assetApi.setAssetAttributes(
	SetAssetAttributesRequest.builder()
	.assetId(assetId)
	.typeId(string2Uuid('00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000003115'))
	.values(["hello"])
	.build()
)

Attribute type	Value
Descriptive example	hello

assetApi.setAssetAttributes(
	SetAssetAttributesRequest.builder()
	.assetId(assetId)
	.typeId(string2Uuid('00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000003115'))
	.values(["hello","you"])
	.build()
)

Attribute type	Value
Descriptive example	hello you

assetApi.setAssetAttributes(
	SetAssetAttributesRequest.builder()
	.assetId(assetId)
	.typeId(string2Uuid('00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000003115'))
	.values([])
	.build()
)

Attribute type	Value
Descriptive example	null (No value has been given yet. Double click or use the edit button.)

Former User

·5 years ago · Edited

That’s fantastic! Got to love HTML5!

Such a game changer

arthurburkhardt

OP5 years ago · Edited

Following your comments, I came up with a way to document fields in a workflow form

<details>
    <summary style=“display: revert”>Details</summary>
    Something small enough to escape casual notice.
    <ul>
        <li>You can put</li>
        <li>multiple items</li>
        <li>for a very rich description</li>
    </ul>
</details>

ezgif-2-6465731b983f

jennifertemple

·4 years ago · Edited

This is great as often I want to provide more “help” to people filling out a form in a workflow but don’t want to use up all that real estate. One question (and I apologize if it is a dumb question, I am not an html wiz like you all) but how did you get the arrow next to the name to prompt the user to click for more information in your example. When I copied the code above it works but the arrow is not present and it is not intuitive that clicking on the name of the field will yield additional information - the cursor does not even change to indicate. Thanks in advance - your tips are invaluable on this community site!

arthurburkhardt

OP4 years ago · Edited

Thanks @jennifer_bauer_temple.baxter.com for the kind words

I reallize there is one issue with the code I posted, the quotes are not standard quotes. Here’s the code from the animated example, directly copied from the workflow

<details><summary style="display: revert"><strong>Name</strong></summary>Please provide a comprehensive name for your processing activity that allows understanding of what the process is about. It must be understandable even for external with limited knowledge of the company (e.g. inspector).  <ul><li>Reflect the process </li> <li>Does not contain the name of the vendor </li> <li>Does not contain the name of a tool </li> <li>Abbreviations should be defined </li> <li>Should be in English  </li> <li>Must contain the country or region and if global it should be clear </li></ul><br/></details>

This one should work fine for you.
Sadly, I could not find any other way to create an easy contextual help for the users. All the other workarounds involved a lot more code or were not as nice.
Another one you can try (but I found it was very ugly) is the info tooltip

<span title="I am hovering over the text">This is the text I want to have a mousover</span>

Also, you know you can provide documentation at the top of the task, using the built-in “Documentation” feature, right?
This is helpful to provide guidance for the whole step.

Now that Collibra has resumed the ideation platform, it would be worth voting for the related ideas:
Business process capture - display additional | Ideation platform (collibra.com)

Former User

·3 years ago · Edited

Hello Arthur,
Thanks for this. It really a game changer for business
I am also not a HTML expert and when I use a tooltip (hover over option) for a button it not working well, but if I add in a form for example another field it is working. Do you maybe know how configure it?

arthurburkhardt

OP3 years ago · Edited

The title says it is not working well for button, but yet the screenshot shows that it seems to be working for buttons. Is that what you meant?
Also, I try to balance hacks to provide more value to my stakeholders immediately and asking them to be patient and waiting for new features to avoid too many workarounds.
In this case, the workflow designer feature will provide support for tooltips, so maybe it would be good to avoid workarounds at this time and wait for the workflow designer.
In the meantime, we use the “documentation” flowable field to provide guidance to our users.

Former User

·3 years ago · Edited

Hi Arthur,
Thanks for quick reply. It works only if we add additional field before the button (in my example a Test field), but if we remove it and would like to keep only buttons it doesn’ t work

arthurburkhardt

OP3 years ago · Edited

Ahahahahaha, fantastic.
In that case, why not add a blank checkbox?

Former User

·3 years ago · Edited

He, he of course this works:

arthurburkhardt

OP5 years ago · Edited

Following your comments, I came up with a way to document fields in a workflow form

<details>
    <summary style=“display: revert”>Details</summary>
    Something small enough to escape casual notice.
    <ul>
        <li>You can put</li>
        <li>multiple items</li>
        <li>for a very rich description</li>
    </ul>
</details>

ezgif-2-6465731b983f

Ann Wuyts

·4 years ago · Edited

Thank you for mentioning that idea @arthur.burkhardt. I’ve merged in an older idea (using the ‘info icon’ to supply additional information) as the idea behind both is the same – a better way to supply input guidance to business users. I’ve also shared this thread in the idea’s comments, as it seems these are some useful html tricks to achieve this for now.

Former User

·5 years ago · Edited

Of course, so the generally idea is to add the HTML content the way you usually would and give each thing you want styled a Class you can reference.

In the final form property, you can add a script tag to target all the classes you’ve created and style the parent elements, which happens to be the input itself.

I’ve attached the code for the final form property. For this example, I have 2 Fields I’ve given the class “left_seventy” and “right_thirty”.

The caveat here is that a very deep understanding of the front-end is required to maintain this across updates.

<div class="right_thirty">This is an Example</div>
<script>
  var divs = ["left_seventy", "right_thirty"];
	var styleDivs = [{
    	"width": 68,
      	"margin-left": 2
    },
    {
    	"width": 30,
      	"margin-left": 0      
  }];

	for (divItem in divs) {
      var foundItem = document.getElementsByClassName(divs[divItem]);
      for (var items in foundItem) {
          if (foundItem[items] != undefined) {
              if (foundItem[items].parentElement != undefined) {
                  foundItem[items].parentElement.parentElement.style.width = styleDivs[divItem]["width"] + "%";
                  foundItem[items].parentElement.parentElement.style.cssFloat = "left";
                  foundItem[items].parentElement.parentElement.style.marginRight = styleDivs[divItem]["margin-left"]  + "%";
              }
          }
      }
} 
</script>

pmahend3

·5 years ago · Edited

Some of these are straight-up hacks
I’m surprised that you guys who dabble so much with workflows aren’t aware of many of these tricks. If only you got on a few coaching calls earlier

arthurburkhardt

OP5 years ago · Edited

Ahahahaha, Absolutely!
@pranay.mahendra Absolutely! I discovered some of those features either in coaching or training sessions:

Up until now, I only booked coaching sessions when I have a problem I have trouble resolving on my own. Thinking about your comment, I think I will book more sessions for reviews and guidance, as some form of code review. Would that be alright?
Even though it’s great to get such insightful advice in those sessions, it’s a shame those features are not documented anywhere, especially when one of the strengths of Collibra is to act as a knowledge graph to reduce reliance on tribal knowledge.

@alvin.useree.lloydsbanking.com I forgot to ask, but would you be able to provide the code for this demo user task you should?

pmahend3

·5 years ago · Edited

Yes, Arthur,

If you have the hours, why not use them? Quite honestly, there are quite a few items in the list above that I myself wasn’t aware of. We do have a hard time documenting some of the things mentioned here and a few other things that in hindsight should obviously be referenceable. I have some ideas in mind and will bring this up with our community team and see what they think of the proposal.

Cheers

Former User

·5 years ago · Edited

Ohh, fantastic additions, few there I didn’t know about!

I’d like to share my favourite"It’s a feature not a bug".

You can add html tags in your form property names to style your workflows. Unlike the dashboard editor, script tags are not removed meaning you can literally style everything you see on your workflow forms:

bartvanderlocht

·5 years ago · Edited

arthur.burkhardt:

ecently introduced a “Customization API” in the java v2 API, but it first requires to enable a feature flag.

Answer from support on my request to enable the customizationApi:

“I consulted about this API with my team and found that this Customization API is in fact disabled but cannot be enabled and it is actually reserved in preparation for future projects. In the meantime, you will need to use the regular backup and restore functionality from the console to upload or download customizations.”

bartvanderlocht

·5 years ago · Edited

@arthur.burkhardt

much interest in more details about ‘upload of customization files without restarting your environment and without file system access’
Today our method of uploading new customization-files involves me rebooting the environment at night, so any better solution is welcome

(I’m also thinking: besides the list of 'hidden features", we should also start the list of “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”. I.e. everything that everybody will probably do the wrong way at least once)

arthurburkhardt

OP5 years ago · Edited

Currently customization file upload is not very easy.
Solutions like the Collibra Data Privacy add-on use the migration API to upload customization files. But this feature is not supported.
And Collibra has recently introduced a “Customization API” in the java v2 API, but it first requires to enable a feature flag.

Former User

·5 years ago · Edited

You can define the number of lines you want in the console logs to be more than 200?!

How do you do that?

Im very excited to finally have an opportunity to delete logFile 999999999999 and everything before it from my downloads folder

bartvanderlocht

·5 years ago · Edited

Click on the box where you normally have the ‘Show the last 200 lines’, enter any number, press enter

(thanks @arthur.burkhardt for this tip, it also took me ridiculously long to find this ‘hidden feature’)

bartvanderlocht

·5 years ago · Edited

Already a good list, I agree that the documentation is totally lacking for those topics. 2 more items from top of my head:

You can delete certain entries from the history (using hidden/undocumented method in the activityStreamApi)
Using a timerintermediatecatchevent in a workflow to avoid that a workflow is triggered twice

amirallal

·4 years ago · Edited

@bart.vanderlocht,
Much interested about how can you hide or delete history from the “undocumented” activityStreamApi.
Do you know if it’s possible to implement a history reading restriction for a specific role ?

bartvanderlocht

·5 years ago · Edited

Already a good list, I agree that the documentation is totally lacking for those topics. 2 more items from top of my head:

You can delete certain entries from the history (using hidden/undocumented method in the activityStreamApi)
Using a timerintermediatecatchevent in a workflow to avoid that a workflow is triggered twice

arthurburkhardt

OP5 years ago · Edited

Oh my god, this is better than I thought.

YES, that’s exactly what I’m talking about: crazy good features that now one knows about!

@bart.vanderlocht, very nice additions to the list!
But don’t get me started on undocumented (and unsupported) APIs and features.

migration API endpoint
cma packaging
upload of customization files without restarting your environment and without file system access

One more to add to the list:

documentation of the activities rest API: what the hell am I supposed to put in the contextId to search for activities related to an asset?

The tribal knowledge is getting overwhelming.

Have a nice week-end all!