Glossary
action
An activity that contributes to a topic, such as performing research, completing project management milestones, or collecting supporting documentation. An action includes a workflow and state mechanism with user assignments.
For example, in the Empirica Signal application, default fields for an action include name, description, state, assigned to user, planned completion date, and action completion date.
An action name does not need to be unique but has a unique ID.
attachment
Text, XML, or binary data associated with an action or a topic. An attachment may include comments and custom fields.
An attachment name is not required to be unique.
attachment type
Attachment types include:
- File
- Image—A ZIP file containing one or more files with the JPG, JPEG, PNG, or GIF extension, optionally one or more notes.txt files that contain associated notes encapsulated in an HTML <table> tag and optionally one or more *.txt files with HTML formatted strings. TXT files can be used for titles or annotations in the attachment.
When rendered in a topic, an image attachment is converted to a PDF comprised of the files in the same order as stored in the ZIP file. The PDF is rendered when the user views the attachment.
- Note—A text note, with a maximum length of 2000 characters.
- Table—An XML representation of a table. See XML attachment tables for more information.
- URL—A URL address in the form http[s]://xxx[:port][/yyy.zzz], with a maximum length of 2000 characters.
field metadata
Information about a field name, type, visibility, necessity, and whether the field can be used as a filter. Topics, topic templates, actions, and work teams have field metadata defined in the workflow configuration.
field value
An instance of the field metadata for a topic, topic template, action, or work team (for example, a list of the field values for a topic).
project
A named category. A topic can optionally be grouped into at most one project.
state
A named part of the topic workflow. A user can edit a topic or action and transition it between states in the workflow.
topic
A means of organizing and tracking issues identified from various applications. Reference materials, including result tables, graphs, reports, and external documents related to the subject, can be stored with the topic.
A topic name is not required to be unique but has a unique ID.
topic template
A topic template has prepopulated values that are applied to a new topic. Optionally, a topic template includes topic field values and action field values and can be used when saving to a new topic.
topics service
The Empirica Topics service that handles the Topics API methods described in this document. This is a web service configured as part of the Empirica Signal application.
topics service context
A parameter to every topics method that includes context information such as the username and information for sorting, filtering, and paging.
user name
A username is passed from the client to the server to validate that the user can access or save to particular topics or actions that are associated with work teams.
work team
A work team is a subset of users from an Empirica Signal login group, which is a grouping of users that collaborate on a topic. There can be multiple work teams within the same login group, and the same user can be in one or multiple work teams.
Topics that are made visible to a work team can be viewed by, or assigned to, any of its members depending on the user's work team permissions.
workflow configuration
A workflow configuration contains the topic and action configuration and includes topic and action states, topic and action field metadata, and configuration settings.
