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Key Terms in Context Service
Browse through this collection of terms, key objects, and key concepts. This collection is designed to give Context Service admins, designers, and developers a clear and consistent understanding of concepts to navigate the Context Service landscape.
Required Editions
| Available in: Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Developer, Enterprise, Professional, and Unlimited editions for Industries clouds where Context Service is enabled |
| TERM | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
| Context Service | Simplify the sharing and consumption of business application data by using Context Service. Context Service acts as a generic module, and forms a layer between applications and procedures. Use context service to easily retrieve data and use it across various industry clouds at every step of the process. |
| Context definition | Contains the complete set of information required to execute a particular process. A context definition includes the relationship between nodes and their structure, attributes, context tags, and mapping. |
| Nodes | Canonical objects that contain attributes mapped to real data by the consuming application. A structure is defined between nodes to ensure the correct set of information is passed during each process step. Nodes represent hierarchical or relational data, enabling complex relationships within a context definition. |
| Attributes | Fields on a node that you can map to Salesforce objects or any input data source. |
| Context tags | Unique identifiers that define the context structure and point to specific nodes or attributes within it. Context tags simplify querying and enable consuming applications to directly access the data from the context definition. Each tag is unique within a context definition. |
| Context mapping | Connects nodes and attributes to an input data source so that an application can retrieve and feed data dynamically into a context definition. Every context definition must include at least one context mapping. |
| Mark as Default option | Use this option to set a context mapping as the default mapping to be used when you run the context definition. The default mapping is used when a mapping name or mapping ID isn't provided in the context object. If your context definition includes only one context mapping, be sure to set it as the default mapping. |
| Mark as Transposable option | If a node is marked as transposable, it contains data stored in its attributes as Key and Value pairs. Consuming applications can decide how they want to transpose the data. The key attribute holds the key, and the corresponding attribute marked as value stores the associated value. For example, if you want to determine a product’s price based on one of its attributes, such as the color of the product, you can create a node called ProductAttribute and mark it as transposable. Under the ProductAttribute node, you can add two key-value attributes: Attribute Name (key attribute) and Attribute Value (value attribute). You can store Color as the attribute name and Blue as the attribute value. |
| Standard context definition | A context definition that's shipped by any Salesforce cloud to support some out of the box processes or applications. It's read-only, but customers can use it to create an extended standard definition and clone it to create customized definition with new components. The standard definition components can't be edited or deleted in the extended definition. |
| Extended context definition | A custom context definition created by extending a standard context definition. It inherits all the metadata from the standard context definition, and is upgraded if the original standard definition is upgraded. Customers can perform additive changes to extended context definitions. You can customize or add enhancements to extended context definitions. The core components inherited from the standard definition remain unchanged and can't be modified or deleted. |
| Cloned context definition | A custom context definition created by cloning another standard or custom context definition. Customers can perform any changes to cloned context definitions, including deletions. However, definitions that are cloned from a standard definition aren't upgraded automatically, so you must sync them manually. |
| Context hydration | The process of reading data from actual data sources as defined in context mapping. The data is saved in a temporary data store for consuming applications. |
| Request-scoped context | A context object that exists for the duration of the request that's created as part of an Apex method, REST API, a flow, or an event. |
| Session-scoped context | A context object that exists until the TTL (Time to Live) expires. |
| TTL (Time To Live) | The duration for which Context Service keeps the session-scoped context available for consuming applications. For extended, cloned, or custom definitions, you can set the TTL to any value between 1 minute to 45 minutes. |
