Model Instances¶

Alright, so you have a model and it represents something important in your business - lets say, an Asset. But you have thousands of assets in your organization. How does your model represent each and every one of those?

You need to deploy copies of your model - specifically, one for every thing [1] that you have

These copies are what we call Model Instances.

They are special in that they all share the set of attributes defined in the model. However, the value for each of those attributes may be different for each model instance.

You can think of models and Model Instances as being like a template for a document and the actual document itself.

You first define your template, and then make multiple documents out of that template.

So if you have 23,000 assets in your system, you need to create 23,000 Model Instances of your Asset model.

All of them will share the same action sequences and the same set of attributes, however the actual values for attributes will differ from model instance to model instance.

Footnotes

[1]	that’s a technical term

Attributes of Model Instances¶

Along with inheriting the attributes of the model from which the model instance was created, each model instance also has a few special attributes:

Extra attributes of Model Instances¶
Attribute	Description
Name	This is a display name for the model instance being created. It is shown in search results and labels. This defaults to the name of the model. The \|SetName\| block can be used to explicitly set it to something more useful.
Description	A description of the model instance. Use of this will be depracated shortly.
IsActive	Set to 1 if the model instance is currently active. Otherwise set to 0. All Model Instances are active by default.
Key	This is a number that uniquely identifies a particular model instance

Warning

You can’t explicitly define attributes in your model with names matching any of those special attributes above.

Creating Model Instances¶

There are several ways an instance of a model could be created:

By defining an action using an Action Start block with the mode set to Trigger new Instance. Then, calling this action on a model will automatically create a new instance of the model and run the action sequence for that action on this new instance.
Creating an instance by listening to an incoming event. The Event Start block must be set to Trigger a new Instance to make it trigger a new instance of the model.
By invoking the instance creation dialog in a user interface.
1. This can be done by clicking the Create New Instance link in the side bar of the model designer.
2. If you define an extension attribute in your model, then from that extension’s interface, you can click the |mapextension| icon to create a new instance of the model.

Tip

Probably the most common way you will create an instance is by using an action with the mode set to trigger a new instance. This action can, in-turn be bound to some custom user interface that you build and present to the user.

Removing Model Instances¶

You can disable or deactivate an instance of a model from the instance’s details screen.

There are three ways to deactivate an instance:

From the instance details screen, click on the Deactivate link in the sidebar to deactivate the instance.

Use a |deactivate| block in your action sequence to deactivate the current instance

Call the deactivate() function in a Javascript block to deactivate an instance.

Deativating an instance does not permanently remove it from the system. It sets the IsActive status to 0.

Deactivated instances can still responed to actions and details about them can be viewed. However

They do not respond to event triggers
By default, they do not show up in the search page for that model, unless you specifically enable the Include inactive items filter.

Warning

The system will periodically flush out inactive instances, so do not expect them to always be present. If you need some way of marking an instance as not valid but still want to see it in the system, then define your own custom attribute for this and as a convention, set its value to 1 or 0 to mark it as valid or invalid.

Note

When composing a data source to list out instances, you almost always want to include a filter to remove inactive instances. Add the IsActive attribute to the datasource and set its value to 1 under the Conditions section.

Instance Dashboards¶

Each instance of a model can have a dynamic dashboard associated with it. Use this dashboard to track information in real-time and get up to date information. These dashboards are self-assembling - you can use logic in your action sequence to determine what to show and when to show it.