I’ve been monumentally dissappointed with Teamworks Authoring environment for a long long time but this one really takes the cake.

You can embed items inside BPDs and services.  When you embed something there is a tab that allows you to map data from the higher level item to the lower level item.   

For Services, there is a check box for every parameter that allows you to "Use Default".  This is good and natural behavior.

But for BPDs, there is no visual indication that there are any defaults or not.  To use the default value, you must first know it exists, then leave the data mapping blank.

Why is this so incredibly WRONG? 

1) Because we have 2 different Data-Mapping interfaces that behave differently.

2) You can’t tell if a mapping will generate an error or not without openning the embedded item.

3) If an item is set up to use defaults and the default is later moved, there is no indication from the outside that it will crash.

 

Lombardi Tech support finally explained this to me.  I pity anyone trying to develop a process that doesn’t understand how this works.