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Set up Acquisition.gov Integration

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This content applies solely to Government Clause Automation, which must be purchased separately from the Appian base platform. This content was written for Appian 26.6 and may not reflect the interfaces or functionality of other Appian versions.

Appian Government Clause Automation (GCA) comes with an Acquisition.gov integration. To utilize the Acquisition.gov integration, you must create a GitHub account and personal access token to use with the solution after configuring it.

Caution:  If you do not create a GitHub account, which is required to integrate your GCA solution with Acquisition.gov, it may cause your GCA-Acquisition.gov integration to hit a rate limit enforced by GitHub, resulting in incomplete clause syncs.

Learn how to register for your GitHub account, token, and configure your GCA application. You can also retrieve Acquisition.gov clause data by manually importing the data with a ZIP file.

Create Github account and token

You must create a GitHub account and personal access token to integrate Government Clause Automation (GCA) with Acquisition.gov.

To set up a GitHub account:

  1. Navigate to https://www.github.com.
  2. Enter your email address in Email address.
  3. Click Sign up for GitHub>Continue.
  4. Create a password and click Continue.
  5. Enter N.
  6. Enter a username and click Continue.
  7. Click Start Puzzle and complete the puzzle.
  8. Click Create account.
    • Check your email for a notification from Github and enter the code they provided.

To create a personal access token:

  1. Navigate to https://github.com/settings/tokens.
    • Note: Make sure you are on the Personal access token page.
  2. Sign in to your GitHub account.
  3. Select Generate new token.
  4. In the Note field, enter a name.
  5. For Select scopes, select public_repo.
  6. Click Generate token.
  7. Click the Copy/Clipboard icon to copy the unique ID generated in the green section.

Be sure to create a personal access token for each environment where you have the solution deployed.

Configure application

After creating your account and personal access token, you need to configure your Government Clause Automation (GCA) application to use the saved token.

  1. Access your Appian Designer.
  2. In your application, select AS GCA Full Application.
  3. Next to the object type, select Connected System.
  4. Select AS GCM Github.
  5. Find the Username field and update it with the username you created in step 6.
  6. Find the Password field and paste the saved personal access token.
  7. Click SAVE.

Caution:  Do not use these credentials in multiple environments. Doing so can lead to errors when syncing clauses to GCA.

GitHub connected system configuration with username and password fields in Appian Designer

Sync behavior

When Government Clause Automation (GCA) syncs clause data from Acquisition.gov, the solution uses smart sync logic to minimize unnecessary updates. The sync compares the following fields for each clause:

  • Clause name.
  • Clause number.
  • Effective date.
  • Clause text.

GCA only overwrites clause records where one or more of these fields have changed. Unchanged clauses are not modified during the sync.

Alternate clause processing

After a sync completes, GCA automatically processes alternate clause text. The system performs two operations:

  • Strips alternate instruction blocks from base clause records.
  • Merges alternate instructions into base clause text to produce clean, standalone alternate clause bodies.

The alternate clause processing uses a hybrid approach. Approximately 77% of clauses are processed using rule-based logic, while the remaining clauses use AI-assisted transformation with confidence scoring. All AI-processed clauses require Privileged User review before they are finalized.

Note:  Because base and alternate clauses originate from the same file, syncing a single clause manually pulls the full file. The syncing updates both the base clause and all related alternates together.

One-time bulk cleanup for existing data

If your organization imported clause data before this release, the existing alternate clause records contain raw content (base text and all alternates stored as identical text). You need to run a one-time bulk cleanup action to process these existing records.

After running the bulk cleanup, all processed clauses enter a Pending Review status. A Privileged User must review and approve the AI-updated text using the sequential review screen before the clauses are finalized.

For instructions on running the bulk cleanup, see Setting up GCA.

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