Managing Entities
An entity represents an object in People Explorer, such as an employee or a project. An entity is composed of a set of attributes, which define the properties of the entity. For example, an Employee entity may have attributes such as: Employee ID, First Name, Last Name, Title, Organization, Work Phone, E-mail.
Each entity must have at least one unique identifier; for example, Employee ID.
When creating an entity, you can base it on an existing system entity type, such as Organization or Employee, or you can create a new custom type.
After you create the entity type, you define the properties of the entity and the way these properties are presented to the user, by adding attributes and attribute groups:
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When adding standalone attributes, you must place them in a presentation group. A presentation group enables grouping a set of standalone attributes to be presented together for a specific entity. For example, the presentation group Contact Information can contain attributes such as: Personal Phone, Work Phone, and E-mail.
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You can add an entire attribute group to an entity profile.
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By default, all new entity types contain a General Information presentation group. The General Information presentation group contains a subset of profile attributes that are displayed in the left pane of the People Explorer Profile page. The General Information presentation group is also displayed whenever a People Explorer user hovers over an entity display name in any People Explorer view. You can configure attributes for the General Information presentation group as for any presentation group. If an existing entity does not contain a system General Information presentation group, you can add it.
The complete set of attribute groups and presentation groups of an entity is referred to as the profile of the entity.
After defining the entity profile, you map the entity attributes to their corresponding columns in the data source files.
Finally, you must define at least one attribute that uniquely identifies the entity.