Process Automation Designer - Don't Understand How to use Collect User Data Activity

[Marc D]

I have been playing with Playbooks and Process Automation Designer to demonstrate its capabilities, and for the most part, I'm satisfied with what is possible. However, there is one major issue. I have been trying to use the Collect User Data activity, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how it works. No matter which selection I use for the "User form for data collection" field, the Collect User Data activity within any test or actual playbook will always display no input variables, and the only option on the playbook will be to skip the activity.

The official documentation is no help - it is very bare-bones for this specific activity and covers nothing about how to display anything or actually collect inputs.

I would appreciate any explanation on how "Collect User Data" for Process Automation Designer works, with a specific example/screen shot of it working.

[MPrince]

Does this apply to Catalog Item Variables on the ticket as well?

We want to be able to pick up variables on the case as inputs, and also have the agent update them from the playbook activity.

[yaronguez]

Unfortunately, no. We are looking into how to reference Catalog Variables within a Playbook. For now, you will have to create a custom Activity whose sub-flow uses the Get Catalog Variables action and maps those outputs to corresponding Sub Flow outputs. Our recommendation is to use our new Questionnaire activity instead of Catalog Variables.

As of Xanadu, you can now add a Playbook Record Generator as a Service Catalog Item instead of a Record Producer. Instead of defining Catalog Variables to collect arbitrary data from the requestor, you can add a Questionnaire activity to do so within the Playbook. This has the added benefit for versioning so that you can safely modify the questions within a Questionnaire without impacting any previously running Playbooks. It also makes it easier to move a Playbook between instances since the Questionnaire's questions are all included in a single Process Definition update set.

[Sophie Lemaitr1]

In case it helps, I managed to collect arbitrary data from users by using Decision Trees.

And I found Recommended Actions much easier to define and configure on top of Decision Trees than Playbooks.

[yaronguez]

Decision Trees are moving into Playbook with the introduction of the Questionnaire activity and Decision Branching.

[Community Alums]

Did you get an answer to this? I am running into the same issue.