Understanding assignment in Guidewire PolicyCenter

At its core, the concept of assignment in Guidewire PolicyCenter is basically equivalent to ownership. The user to whom you assign an activity is the user who owns that activity, and who, therefore, has primary responsibility for it. Ownership of a Policy entity, for example, works in a similar fashion. Guidewire defines an entity that someone can own in this way as assignable.

Assignment in Guidewire PolicyCenter is usually made to a user and a group, as a pair (group, user). However, the assignment of a user is independent of the group. In other words, you can assign an entity to a user who is not a member of the specified group.

Important: In the base configuration, PolicyCenter provides assignment methods that take only a user and that assign the entity to the default group for that user. Guidewire deprecates these types of assignment methods. Do not use them. Guidewire recommends that you rework any existing assignment methods that only take a user into assignment methods that take both a user and a group.

Assignment Entity Persistence

PolicyCenter persists an assignment anytime that you persist the entity being assigned. Therefore, if you invoke the assignment methods on an entity from Gosu code, you must persist that entity. For example, you can persist an entity as part of a page commit in the PolicyCenter interface.

Assignment Queues

Each group in Guidewire PolicyCenter has a set of AssignableQueue entities associated with it. It is possible to modify the set of associated queues.

Guidewire supports assigning Activity entities only to queues. Guidewire deprecates the assignToQueue methods on Assignable in favor of the assignActivityToQueue method. This makes the restriction more clear.

If you assign an activity to a queue, you cannot simultaneously assign it to a user as well.