Don't want to manually document every asset in dScribe? We feel you! While some documentation and governance efforts will always require human contributions, you can save yourself from a lot of the manual work by leveraging automations in dScribe.

Automations can be used to automatically:

assign custom property values to assets
assign owners to assets
restrict the discovery of assets

Automations can be managed in the Admin Portal > Automation.

Understanding the Two Types of Automations

There are two types of automations in dScribe:

Source-Triggered Automations – These are triggered when an asset is created or updated by an external source (e.g., Power BI).
Action-Triggered Automations – These occur when an action is performed within dScribe, such as a manual update or a bulk update.

Why is this distinction important?

To prevent overlapping automations and avoid potential locks on assets being updated, automations triggered by external sources will not trigger action-based automations within dScribe, and vice versa.

Understanding this difference ensures smoother automation handling and prevents unintended conflicts or errors when updates occur.

A source triggered automation contains always the following when statement

! The above automation will not be triggered when creating a dataset or report within dScribe.

Defining an automation

When and Then statements

Each automation includes a when statement and a then statement:

When statement

This statement defines the conditions that need to be fulfilled before the execution of an automation is triggered. When defining your initial conditions, more options gradually become available. For example, when you define that an asset is created, coming from a Source of type 'SAP Analytics Cloud', you will be able to use Source Metadata specific to that source type to add additional conditions:

Note also that every circled part of your conditions can be clicked to change its value:

Then statement

This statement defines what actions should happen if the when statement of an automation is fulfilled. The list of available actions depend on the type of conditions you have included in the when statement.

Text operators

Good to know:

All text operators are case insensitive.
Wildcards don't work in text operators, characters such as * or % are treated literally.
Make sure you define your values in the correct way. You can take a look at the 'Source Information' section of your already loaded assets to see the correct formatting.

Contains

With this operator, you look for any results that contain the inputted value.

Does not contain

With this operator, you look for any results that do not contain the inputted value.

Starts with

With this operator, you look for any results that start with the inputted value. For example, the automation below will execute for all assets stored in (a subfolder of) the folder "Public/Finance":

Ends with

With this operator, you look for any results that end with the inputted value.

Matches exactly

An exact match will always look for a precise text match. For example, the automation below will execute for all assets stored directly in the folder "Public/Finance":

Automation Status

Each automation has a state. Automations with State = Inactive will not run until they are set to Active.

Example Automation

The example below shows an automation that will automatically set the Property Domain to 'Finance' for any newly created reports or datasets coming from Source 'SAP Analytics Cloud reporting' and stored under the folder 'Public/Finance':