To define a qualifier item in Designer, you specify all of the following:
•The left argument
•The operator
•The right argument
These three pieces together form a statement, such as these:
Sample Qualifier Statements
Left argument |
Operator |
Right argument |
The value selected in the Loss Type list field |
is |
Fire Damage |
The current user |
is not |
a member of the Outside Counsel group |
The Trial Date |
is changed |
from any date to any date |
The Expiration Date field |
is populated |
[none] |
If you add these statements as qualifier items, or conditions, the rule will evaluate the statements to determine whether the rule's action must be executed when a user triggers the rule.
The type of data being compared in the left and right arguments must match. For example, if your left argument identifies a list field, then your operator and right argument options allow you to compare the selection with a selection made in another list field or to a literal list value.
The Designer user interface is designed to deny illogical combinations of left arguments, operators, and right arguments, such as: "The Trial Date is the Outside Counsel group."
Tip: If you find a rule executing in a situation where you did not expect it to, carefully check how you have constructed your qualifiers. In some cases, when the left qualifier evaluates to an unknown value and the right qualifier also evaluates to an unknown value, the rule engine will consider this a match. For example, consider an Audit rule triggered by Create that affects Involved records, and has a qualifier with these characteristics:
Left qualifier = inactiveDate
Operation = X Days from Today
Right qualifer = (no value)
In this case, when you create a new Involved record that is active, the rule will execute. That's because the value of inactiveDate is null, since the record has never been inactivated. And because the right qualifier was specified incorrectly (an integer should have been entered, but wasn't), the right qualifier's value is also null. Thus the rule engine considers the two nulls a match, and the rule executes. You should fix the incorrect specification of the right qualifier. Also, to guard against such inadvertent errors, you could add a second qualifier, testing the isPopulated condition for the inactiveDate field, so that the rule would only execute when that field was actually populated.
For details about the options available when constructing qualifier items for each type of data, see:
