What is an activity pattern?

Activity patterns standardize the way that Guidewire PolicyCenter creates activities. Activity patterns describe the kinds of activities that people perform while handling policies within an organization. For example, reviewing and approving a policy renewal is a common activity. Thus, it has its own activity pattern that creates a reminder to perform this activity.

Patterns act as templates for creating activities. Activity patterns define the typical practices for each activity. For example, this is its name, its relative priority, and the standards for how quickly it is to complete (that is, its due dates). If a user (or a rule) adds an activity to the workplan for a policy, PolicyCenter uses the activity pattern as a template to set default values for the activity. (For example, an activity pattern can set the subject, priority, or target date for the activity.)

You can set up and customize the Activity Patterns that make sense for your policies business processes from the Administration tab in PolicyCenter. It is possible to create activities from activity patterns in different ways:

  • You can manually create activities in PolicyCenter.
  • A business rule or some other Gosu code create activities as part of generating workplans or while responding to escalations, policy exceptions, or other events.
  • PolicyCenter automatically creates activities to handle manual assignment or approvals, for example.
  • External applications create activities through API calls.

You can view the list of available Activity Patterns by selecting New Activity from the Actions menu on one of the Summary pages.

Important: After an activity pattern is in production, do not delete it as there can be old activities tied to it. Instead, edit the activity pattern and change the Automated only field to Yes. This prevents anyone from creating new activities of that type.

An activity pattern does not control how PolicyCenter assigns an activity. Instead, activity assignment methods in Gosu expressions control how PolicyCenter assigns an activity. Using the pattern name, the assignment methods determine to whom to assign the activity.