When you have Cloud Assembly properties that always appear together, you can assemble them into a property group.
You can quickly add a property group to different Cloud Assembly designs, which saves the time of adding the same multiple properties one by one. In addition, you have a single place to maintain or modify the set of properties, which ensures their consistent application.
Only users with the Cloud Assembly Administrator role may create, update, or delete a property group. The administrator can share a property group with an entire organization or limit its use to only within a project.
A property group might be included in many cloud templates, including ones that are already released to the catalog. Changes to a property group can affect other users.
There are two types of property groups.
- Inputs
Input property groups gather and apply a consistent set of properties at user request time. Input property groups can include entries for the user to add or select, or they might include read-only values that are needed by the design.
Properties for the user to edit or select can be readable or encrypted. Read-only properties appear on the request form but can't be edited. If you want read-only values to remain totally hidden, use a constant property group instead.
- Constants
Constant property groups silently apply known properties. In effect, constant property groups are invisible metadata. They provide values to your Cloud Assembly designs in a way that prevents a requesting user from reading those values or even knowing that they're present. Examples might include license keys or domain account credentials.
The two property group types are handled very differently by Cloud Assembly. When you create a property group, you must first select whether to create inputs or constants. You can't create a blended property group nor convert an existing set of properties and their property group from one type to the other.
