If you are putting together a detailed Environment Manager configuration, you may find yourself creating the same Conditions over and over again. A common example of this is the User | Is Administrator (False) condition – this is often used at the start of each Logon trigger to ensure the actions created do not apply to anyone in the local Administrators group.
To save yourself the pain of having to create the same Conditions repeatedly, AppSense EM comes with a handy shortcut in the form of Reusable Conditions. They appear in the Library section in your Environment Manager Console window, and can be added to at any time you so wish.
We are going to create a simple Reusable Condition to match the example we already talked about, the check for local Administrator group membership.
First we create a node with a relevant title under the Reusable Conditions section, and then add the Condition that we want to by adding Condition | User | Is Administrator to the node
We make sure that the Condition is set to check that the user is not an Administrator
And now the Condition is available in our Reusable Conditions node as below
The Condition is now available for use in other triggers and nodes. However, you may notice that Reusable Conditions does not appear if you right-click in your node and choose Condition. You need to switch to the Conditions tab at the top and use the Reusable Conditions button
Now you should see your Reusable Condition applied to your configuration like shown below, and you can work with it by adding actions after it
You can also, in the Reusable Conditions node, see the scope of where the Reusable Condition is utilized. This will come in handy if you should ever feel the need to delete or adjust the Reusable Condition.
You can also create Reusable Conditions from existing Conditions in a configuration by using this process
- Select the node containing the condition you want to make reusable.
- Right-click and select Copy to Reusable Conditions. The option is also available from the Clone button in the Nodes ribbon.
- If the condition you are copying has Stop if fails enabled, you are prompted that this option is not available in the reusable conditions library.
- A new node is automatically created in the Reusable Conditions trigger containing a duplicate condition which is now available as a Reusable Condition. You should rename this as appropriate.
So that covers the Reusable Conditions feature. One issue I have is that it isn’t possible to keep a library of Reusable Conditions that you can access from separate configurations. You can simply cut and paste them from one configuration to another, but if you then modify one you would have to modify every instance of it. It would be really handy if Reusable Conditions could be stored central to the Management Server in the same way Personalization is, allowing you to access them from a blank configuration. Maybe something for a future release?
A final note about the processing of Reusable Conditions. When a user logs on, all the Reusable Conditions are processed initially and then cached ready for use if they are called at different trigger points from the configuration. To this end, putting together a huge amount of them may not be a good idea if you are sensitive to any increase in the logon time. Try and use a bit of common sense and only create the Reusable Conditions you need for the configuration in hand, rather than recreating lots you may never use.
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