Resources

The primary mechanism for passing information between the caller application and PolicyCenter is the resource. A resource is an instance of data that you can create, modify, delete, or query for. Resources are defined in JSON schema files.

Every resource has a type. The type defines the Guidewire data model entities that the resource maps to. For example, Activity resources map to the Activity data model entity. In most cases, each resource maps to a single data model entity. However, there are some resources which map to multiple data model entities. For example, the AccountContact resource maps to three data model entities in PolicyCenter: AccountContact, Contact, and AccountContactRole.

Resources contain a set of fields. Each field stores information about the resource. Depending on the context, fields are also referred to as properties or attributes.

Resources are exchanged in the payloads of the request and response objects. The payload is a block of JSON-formatted text that contains fields from the relevant resources and their values. The following is a portion of the response payload for an Activity resource.

"attributes": {
    "assignedGroup": {
        "displayName": "Auto1 - TeamA",
        "id": "demo_sample:31"
    },
    "assignedUser": {
        "displayName": "Andy Applegate",
        "id": "demo_sample:1"
    },
    "dueDate": "2020-11-16T08:00:00.000Z",
    "id": "xc:20",
    "priority": {
        "code": "urgent",
        "name": "Urgent"
    "subject": "Contact claimant"
}

Note that a field can store:

• A scalar value, such as the subject field.
• A set of values, such as the assignedUser field. This is referred to as an inline object.
• An array of objects. (There is no example of this in Activity. If there were, the field name would be followed by square braces ([ and ]) delimiting the array. Each array member would be listed in curly braces ({ and }).

Every resource can be uniquely defined by its resource ID. This is stored in the resource's id field. For example, the activity in the previous example has a resource ID of xc:20. For most endpoints, the id field maps to the data model entity's PublicID field. (However, there are some endpoints that map id to a different field. For example, in PolicyCenter, the resource ID for a line is its line prefix. This means that the line resource on a personal auto policy has an id value of something similar to PersonalAutoLine, and not pc:114567.)

A single resource is called an element. For example, /contact/xc:203 is an element. (In some REST API literature, this is also referred to as a singleton.)

A set of resources is called a collection. For example, /contact/xc:203/addresses (the addresses associated with contact xc:203) is a collection.