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AppDNA Current Release AppDNA 7.15
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Use application attributes

Aug 14, 2017

Use application attributes to assign user-defined values to applications in AppDNA. This is useful when using AppDNA as a decision-making tool. For example, an application may have an attribute that defines its owner and their email address. After importing and analyzing the application, you can use the report value to generate an email to send to the application owner for the next action.

Application attributes have two important parts:

  1. An ApplicationAttributeDefinition. This defines what type of values can be assigned to an application, including a name, description and other properties.
  2. The value assigned to each application for a given attribute definition.

Therefore, an application attribute links an application and an ApplicationAttributeDefinition together with a value.

Create an ApplicationAttributeDefinition

You create an ApplicationAttributeDefinition using the object returned from the Server.ApplicationAttributeDefinition. For example:

``` pre codeblock using AppDNA = Citrix.SDK.AppDNA; AppDNA.Server appdna; appdna = login.AppDNAServer;

AppDNA.ApplicationAttributeDefinition definition = appdna.ApplicationAttributeDefinition.CreateStringDefinition(“ApplicationOwner”, “Application Owner”, false, AppDNA.AttributeDefinitionVisibilities.ShowInAppList, 0);


Similarly, you retrieve an existing definition as follows:

``` pre codeblock
definition = appdna.ApplicationAttributeDefinition.Get("ApplicationOwner");

Set and retrieve values

Use an Application object to assign a value for a given ApplicationAttributeDefinition. For example:

``` pre codeblock AppDNA.ApplicationAttribute SetAttributeValue(AppDNA.Application app, AppDNA.ApplicationAttributeDefinition definition, string value) { return app.SetAttribute(definition.Identifier, value); }


Use a property of the Application class to retrieve a collection of application attributes set for that application.

Note: the Application.Attributes property includes only application attribute objects for definitions used to set a value on the application; unused objects are not included.

From the ApplicationAttribute, you can retrieve the value and the ApplicationAttributeDefinition. For example:

``` pre codeblock
void PrintApplicationAttributes(AppDNA.Application app)
{
    foreach (var attribute in app.Attributes)
    {
        string valueString = string.Empty;
        if (attribute.IsNull)
            valueString = "<null>";
        else
        {
            switch (attribute.Definition.DataType)
            {
                case AppDNA.AttributeDefinitionDataType.Boolean:
                    valueString = attribute.BooleanValue.ToString();
                    break;

                case AppDNA.AttributeDefinitionDataType.DateTime:
                    valueString = attribute.DateTimeValue.ToString();
                    break;

                case AppDNA.AttributeDefinitionDataType.Numeric:
                    valueString = attribute.NumericValue.ToString();
                    break;

                case AppDNA.AttributeDefinitionDataType.Rag:
                    valueString = attribute.RagValue.ToString();
                    break;

                case AppDNA.AttributeDefinitionDataType.String:
                case AppDNA.AttributeDefinitionDataType.StringList:
                    valueString = attribute.StringValue;
                    break;
            }
        }
        Console.WriteLine(attribute.Definition.Name + " : " + valueString);
    }
}