Controlling Employee Input Using Regular Expressions

In many companies, there are certain standards that must be followed when configuring a software application.  

For example:

• your IT Department may have a password standard that requires all passwords to be a minimum of 8 characters, including at least one letter, one number, and one symbol.

• your Operations Department may have a naming convention standard that requires that all Learning Objects (Process Sets, Processes, Sub Processes, Tasks and Resources) be preceded by the 3 letters that reference the particular area of learning (Corporate would be COR, Operations would be OPS, etc).

To control that these standards are followed, the System Owner can select the affected property, and enter a regular expression that satisfies these parameters.  This is accomplished in the Validation tab of the Property Definition dialog.  From here, you can also enter a message that will appear to an Employee if they have not followed the standard.

The following steps would be followed to satisfy the following parameters:

A company wishes to control the name of all Tasks.  They would like to have (XXX) ~ Task Name ~ 00 where:

• (XXX) signifies the department that the training belongs to, in ALL CAPS

• 00 indicates the number of training hours that the employee will be granted for completing the Task.

1. Select Tools/ Object Definitions from the main menu.

The Object Definitions dialog appears.

2. Expand an Object, select the Property you wish to standardize.
3. Click Edit.

The Property Definitions - Display Information tab appears.

4. Select the Validation tab.

The Validation tab appears.

At this point, you will likely be entering either a Match Expression or a Do Not Match Expression.  This means that you either want the information to match a certain set of parameters, or not match a certain set of parameters.

5. Enter the appropriate Regular Expression in the Match Expression or Do Not Match Expression fields.
6. Click the corresponding Edit Message button.

The Edit Match Message or Edit Do Not Match Message dialog appears.

7. If the Employee does not enter information that matches the set parameters, enter a message that details what is required to resolve the problem.
8. Click OK.

If your Regular Expression parameters conflict with the current Default Value, you may have to change the Default Value also.  If this is the case, attempting to close the Property Definitions dialog without changing the Default Value will produce an error.  Modify your Default Value (on the General Information tab) as required.

9. Click OK.

The next time you create an Object that contains this Property, the Regular Expression parameters will be enforced.  If you select an existing Object, whose Property does not follow the parameter, you will be asked to change it.  

Please Note: Setting a Regular Expression parameter for a Property will not change the values set for Objects/ Properties that existed before changing the Value. For example, any Tasks that were named before the change will not be required to be modified unless you select a particular pre-existing Task and attempt to navigate away from it.