Difficulty: novice

Content

Learning Objectives

After reading this article, you’ll be able to:

Know what categories are used for
Understand the effect of categories on:
- Workflows
- Pages

Categories

Objects in Workplace have categories, based on categories these objects can have different instance pages or workflows (see more on pages in How to create and label a page. and workflows Workflows basics ). Many objects have predefined categories in the FMB.

Workflows

The object Reservation for example has multiple categories. Different categories can use different workflows. A simple workplace reservation, where we only need to reserve a workplace is fairly simple. We select a room, check it’s availability and book it. Other FMB reservations might also include reserving catering, or specific assets like beamers, laptops, speakers. In these reservations we could also assign people tasks like giving out or taking back the laptop/speaker.

So depending on the Reservation category the process of making a reservation might differ. This is done so that users don’t see fields/functions that are not being used in specific cases.

Pages

The same goes for instance pages:

Depending on the category of the object we can show/hide category specific fields. For example, fields like License plate/Mileage we only use for assets in the category: car. We can then make sure these are only visible on the car instance page, but not on any other pages, so that end users only see fields/functions important to those objects.

Summary

Exercise

#1
#2

What is a category?