Custom Attributes are attributes whose values are stored and persisted within Alloy's system and used across all of your workflows. Unlike regular Input and Output Attributes that are limited in scope to a single workflow, each Custom Attribute value can be used across any and all of your workflows.

There are many ways to create and use a Custom (Publsihed) Attribute, which we will cover in detail, but a typical process is:

Define and add a new Custom (Published) Attribute (e.g., customer_income) in a workflow (e.g., Transaction Monitoring) as an Input Attribute.
Publish a new value for customer_income for one or more of your Entities via the /published-attributes API.
Make a request using the Transaction Monitoring workflow without needing to provide a value for_customer_income_. The previously published value will automatically be used.

Key Concepts

All Custom (Published) Attribute values are associated with a specific Entity or business object. They are simply named values that are available within our system and should not be thought of as either Input Attributes or Output Attributes. They can function as both, depending on how they are used in a particular workflow. One workflow can use a Custom (Published) Attribute as an Output Attribute in a given workflow and then, once an Evaluation of that workflow runs for a given Entity, that published value will become available in the system. After that, whenever an Evaluation runs in a workflow that uses the Published Attribute as an Input Attribute, that latest value will automatically be used.

Custom (Published) attributes can currently be used on Entity Objects and Transaction objects.

All Custom (Published) Attributes must have a default value defined so that if a value has not been specifically published, a value will still be available when that Custom (Published) Attribute is referenced for a given Entity. The default value may simply be an indicator that no valid value is available and then a workflow can adjust accordingly. For example, there is no valid default for a customer's income, but a value of -1 can indicate that there is no valid published value for a given Entity.

Example Scenario

Here's a more visual example of how this works in our system.

From the dashboard, you can define any Custom (Published) Attributes you need. Let's say you define 'Customer Income' and 'Risk Score.' Then you send in new Customer Income values for each of your Entities as you receive them. You may have values for some, but not all of your Entities. The default value will be provided for any Entities that don't have an actual published value.

Your 'Account Opening - CRR Assignment' workflow can then use the Customer Income Custom (Published) Attribute as an Input Attribute and it can also generate new values for the Risk Score Custom (Published) Attribute. Whenever an Entity is evaluated through this workflow, a new Risk Score will be calculated and published into the system.

When your 'Transaction Monitoring' workflow runs at a later time, it will pick up whatever new value was calculated in 'Account Opening - CRR Assignment' automatically.