VARIANT
Description
VARIANT aggregates all activities of a case into a string, which represents a variant of the process. SHORTENED can be used to shorten self-loops to a maximum number of occurrences. The resulting column is case-based and contains one value for each case that gives the (shortened) string of activities for this case.
Syntax
VARIANT ( activity_table.string_column )
activity_table.string_column: A string column of an activity table. Usually, the activity column of an activity table is used.
SHORTENED ( VARIANT ( activity_table.column ) [, max_cycle_length ] )
activity_table.column: A string column of an activity table. Usually, the activity column of an activity table is used.
max_cycle_length: More than max_cycle_length consecutive occurrences of the same activity are reduced to max_cycle_length occurrences. Default Value is 2.
SHORTENED
Sometimes, different cases may have self-loops of the same activity but with a different number of activities. Consequently, these cases are related to different variants. However, in some applications it is not of interest how often an activity is repeated but only if there is a self-loop or not. For such cases, the VARIANT operator can be wrapped by the SHORTENED command which shortens self-loops to a maximum number of occurrences. In this way, it is possible to abstract from repeated activities and reduce the number of distinct variants. The limit for the length of the self-loops can be specified by an optional parameter. The default value for the maximum cycle length is 2.
Input column
The input column can be any (modified) string column of the activity table. Usually, the activity column is used, but it is also possible to create variants based on a resource column, like user name or country information. Activities can also be grouped together by mapping activity names, for example using REMAP_VALUES. A filtered column (e.g. FILTER_TO_NULL) is not supported as input. If a filtered column is required as input, it is recommended to use PU_STRING_AGG.
NULL handling
If an input value is NULL, VARIANT ignores the value.
Examples
[1] This example shows how | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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[2] If | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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[3] Here is an example in which, instead of the ACTIVITY column, another column is used as input for | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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[4] In this example, activity 'B' is ignored in | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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[5] Here all occurrences of the activities 'B' and 'C' are remapped to 'BC' using the REMAP_VALUES operator: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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