Data Integration

Interviews can load application data when they start, and save collected data and decisions when they complete. To enable this behavior:

  • If your application does not already support Intelligent Advisor connections, you will need to implement a web service connector that conforms with the Connector Framework.
  • Create a connection to your application in Intelligent Advisor Hub.
  • Deploy a project that uses your connection, that contains data mappings to application tables and fields, and has at least one submit button in the interview.

Interview checkpoints allow users to resume interviews that were interrupted. To enable interview checkpoints:

For more information, see Enable an Interview to Be Resumed Using Checkpoints.

Interviews that load and save data from an external application via a web service connection will usually need to specify the context (the user or the user's request) in which that interview is running, so that a web service connector knows where to load data from when the interview starts, and where to save data to when it is submitted. You can achieve this by appending parameters to the start URL for the Intelligent Advisor interview, in combination with a web service connector. This will enable you to run instances of interviews with a single policy model, but with different contexts.

Some examples of ways in which you might use URL parameters are:

  • Passing an identifying hash of the user name or session ID into the Intelligent Advisor interview, which the connector has been developed to understand. The connector then contacts another service to verify the credentials, or queries an underlying database to retrieve or save sensitive data.
  • Passing information about the request context into the Intelligent Advisor interview which varies the table the Global entity in the policy model loads or saves data to.
  • Answering, with non-sensitive data, some of the Intelligent Advisor interview questions for which answers are already known. For example, the fact that the customer has already identified that they are interested in a specific loan product under a certain price.
  • Passing in parameters to apply constraints on queries the connector makes to an underlying database, and hence return different attribute values or non-global entities.
  • Loading context-specific reference data for the particular interview that is about to start. For example, location data might be used to load threshold rates. By passing the location as a URL parameter, the web service connection can load data into the interview session for payment rates. Note that only data that is permitted to be seen by any interview user should be loaded into an interview session using this approach.

Essentially, context parameters can be used for any purpose which the developers of the connector can think of.

For more information, see Use URL Parameters to Specify Context.

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