Application Category a Mandatory Field?

[cbaser]

I recently installed EA in our Dev environment.  After doing so, it seems now the Application Category field is mandatory.  Up to now we were not using that field in our Business Applications table, and have it hidden in the detailed view our users view/modify their Business Applications in.  After installing EA (in Xanadu), now when anyone tries to make an update to an application, or add a new one, it fails and indicates that Application Category is a mandatory field.  However when I unhide the field from the list view and look at the definitions, it is not marked mandatory.  Is there another location where installation of the EA module could be marking Application Category as mandatory?  We DO plan to use that field in the future, it just wasn't one in our initial effort.

[Mathew Hillyard]

Hi @cbaser,

To my knowledge Application Category has been a mandatory field within EA/APM for some time, certainly as long as I have been working with the product.

Application Category is specific to EA - this goes against the principle of all fields in a table being in the same application scope, but this field is in the EA scope, whereas Business Application is in Global. This precludes setting the Mandatory flag on the Dictionary Entry - in thr EA scope you can see it is greyed out.

The mandatory status is set two ways:

1. The onLoad Client Script "Set Application Category mandatory" for form-side changes
2. The Business Rule "Check if Application Category is empty" to prevent list updates from resulting in an empty value.

Without EA/APM you just have a list of Business Applications. When you implement EA/APM it is critical to start defining what those Business Applications are, and a key first step is to define the Application Category hierarchy. You can of course disable the Client Script and Business Rule and populate the values later but if possible try to define this early on.

Hope this helps!

[mcastoe]

Application Category is meant to express the "technical function: of the Business Application which is quite differnt from Business Capabilities provided.  As Mathew put is in his reply. it what the Business apps are.  It very valuable for rationalization and in fact allows for basic rationalization at a low overall maturity level.

All that said, i recommend adding a new Category called Uncategorised or None and assigning it until such time you are ready for it. 

[cbaser]

Thanks Tera and Mark for the replies.  I now see the script that is setting it to mandatory, it was confusing to me as the table/field definition didn't indicate mandatory.  We fully intend to make use of that field, I was just hoping to buy a little time to determine what our categories and category groups would be.  Rather than disabling the script I think I'll take the suggestion of just assigning it to None or Uncategorized for the immediate time.