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This page, although it has a large number of screen snapshots, will give you but a small sample of the large number of custom RoAccess applications this company has created to better serve their own clients who use their Repository. This company has found that these screens add considerable functionality and usability of their system.
Normally, one brings up the first page of RoAccess, to select frames or not, the language and other options. He then logs in and selects a Subject Area. The company wanted to make it easier for their non-technical users, so they could do different things by merely clicking ONE button, and so created a custom user friendly front end.
This user friendly front end instead allows a pre-selected general access read-only user to enter a pre-selected Consolidated Subject Area. No logins or Subject Area selection are needed. Clicking the buttons does all that for the user.
This page covers these custom application functionalities:
The company's custom graphics are displayed in the right frame.
The left frame has two sets of buttons:
This way, business users only see what
is appropriate for them.
Another unique aspect is that if you log in as one Business Area, you can keep following links and end up displaying Items of other Business Areas. Since all business area columns eventually point to a "common" or "canonical" or "generic" column, you can traverse from one Business Area to columns in other business areas if you wish.
So this is the best of both worlds. Initially you see only what relates to your area, but if you wish you can expand the horizons to other business areas as well, without having to re-login or select a different Business Area.
Below shows the ItemType List screen that would be shown for two different Business Areas (button clicks): Warehouse and LINIIS
As you can see, although it is the same Subject Area, these two different Business Area users see only the ItemTypes that area appropriate for them!
Warehouse Business Area ItemTypes LINIIS Business Area ItemTypes
Technical note: Initially
this customer tried creating different Rochade User Class Profiles for
each user, and assigned only those ItemTypes for that business area to
that user. This in deed initially listed only the correct ItemType
of interest. However, when following the links to the "generic Item"
and continuing on to other database types, such as Sybase, the pages would
not display because Sybase tables were not assigned to this business area
user. So standard Rochade profiles would not solve this problem.
RoAccess was modified to initially display only the pertinent ItemTypes
for each Business Area. Then subsequently following links to other database
types would display just fine, because all ItemTypes are always available
to all users in this Subject Area.
Here was a requirement: These reports will generate anywhere from 10 rows of data to 10,000 rows of data. Each row of data will contain from 2 to 20 attributes, each attribute being up to 80 columns wide. That is, each cell could contain scrolling text that was quite wide. If you then have 20 attributes that are each up to 80 columns wide, and you have thousands of rows, how do you browse this enormous amount of information on the screen? Use HTML tables? After experimentation it was found that HTML was not a good medium to browse very long and wide pages with so much information. So how DO you browse the data?
Answer: select the "best of the breed browser". In this case Excel was decided to be the browser. All reports were sent in Excel format directly to Excel. Then the user can easily scroll up, down, right and left, search and even sort with great ease in Excel. The user could then create formatting macros to create beautiful reports. The user could also use this Excel file as an import into other applications. So this seems the "ultimate solution": you can browse and export the data for further processing all in one step.
If you click on the Reports button, you get the following screen:
There are three basic classification of Reports:
In this case, click on RBW/TABLE. It pops up a selection screen so you can specify which Table is to be reported upon. After selecting the Table, click the "Display Report" button. The output is then sent directly to the user PC, Excel is automatically run, displaying the report output, as shown below.
Click "Open this file from its current location" if you want to send the report output to Excel directly.
This particular report shows this table has 42 columns. Each column has 16 different attributes that are displayed across the page. Some of the attributes are scrolling text, which in themselves can be 60 to 80 columns wide. So the report can be quite wide.
This allows one to view a great deal of
information about an entire table in a single, simple to use consolidated
report, which was the goal of this system.
When an Item being displayed is a column (Redbrick column, Oracle Column, Sybase Column, etc.) two extra button get displayed:
Below is a typical sequence of screens:
You display the Item info for a "column", such as in this case a column from a Redbrick Database. The Item Display to the right initially looks normal, but because this is a "column" type Item, the DEF and the XREF buttons appear.
First, this screen appears to be a standard Item Display (ItemGet) screen. Instead, their custom code runs up to 3 different path reports and gathers additional information for display, processing and displaying a variety of different custom graphic buttons. The screen looks simple, which is the goal, but it is doing a lot of extra work.
Note that the DEF and XREF buttons appear. If this Item being displayed was anything other than some type of "column" these two buttons would NOT have been displayed. Click on the DEF button to show the Standard Definition. You may have a large number of columns that have different names, that are actually the same column. That correct Standard Definition screen will be displayed, as follows:
Notice, how the above screen has the phrase "Standard Definition". This is to remind you that this display is special and is related to the column that you started with.
If on the other hand, you click the XREF button, the Standard Cross Reference Information screen for that column is displayed, as follows:
Note that the phrase "Standard XREF" is displayed at the top of the screen to remind you that this special screen is an expansion of the "column" you were just viewing.
There is an ItemType named "SPECIFIC_DEFINITION", which holds additional information about generic Items. When you click the DEFN button when viewing a "column", you may see what appears to be the attribute "SPECIFIC_DEFINITION".
Actually, there is no such attribute! Instead a Path Report is run starting with the current column Item, traversing 4 levels, until a Item of SPECIFIC_DEFINITION is found. Then all of the attributes of that SPECIFIC_DEFINITION Item are consolidated and displayed as if it were an attribute of the original Item.
Below is a screen capture:
Note that it appears that SPECIFIC-DEFINITION is merely a normal attribute of ItemType RBW/COLUMN. Such is not the case. One could have placed a link to point the the associated SPECIFIC_DEFINITION Item, but that would then require the user to click it to see that additional information. It was desired that this additional information should be displayed along with the "normal" attributes. So a Path Report is done, that goes 4 levels deep, finds the appropriate SPECIFIC_DEFINITION Item, takes the contents of all its attributes, concatenates them into one text area, and displays it in what appears to be a normal attribute, the name of this "pseudo attribute" actually describing where the data really came from.
This company implemented "Comment Processing". When you are viewing either a column (of any of the database type) a table (again of any database type) or one of the "generic Items", you are allowed to add, review, modify or delete comments all merely by the click of a button! The existence of comments is made by different buttons appearing.
This company has thought of everything.
Below are some screen snapshots:
You start by viewing a Item that is a "Column" or "Table" entry, such as below.
You click on the DEFN button to display the Standard Definition (Generic (Item) for that Column, which is displayed below:
The Standard Definition Screen keeps track of the presence or absence of any Comments. Since no comments exist for this Column, the "Add Comments" button appears. If comments already exist for this column, the the button would read "Browse Comments". Click the "Add Comment" button to get the following screen:
As a convenience for the user, the "comment title" will be used as the basis of automatically creating a unique identifier for this comment. The next section shows you where this Comment will be link to. It will be linked to the RBW/COLUMN that you were viewing, which makes sense. A path report is done to find the parent of this column, and a link is made to that table. Also, a path report is run to find the "generic Item" for this column, and a link will be made to it also. This way, you will be notified of the presence of this comment if you are viewing the related tables, columns or generic Items, which is extremely useful.
Note the: LOGON ID attribute. The REAL user name from the user's PC is stored with any comment that is created. That way, only that user can update or delete the comment. This is yet another level of security that this company implemented.
Click the "Add Comment" button, and you get the following screen:
This is the standard Comment View Screen. If there are more than one comment for this column, they will be listed one after the other so you can see them all.
Should you later want to update the comment, merely display it (this screen again) and click the "Update Comment" button, to get the following screen:
What is most important to note is that initially the Comment was automatically linked to what made sense: the Table, the Column and the Generic Item for that column. The Update Comment screen allows you to link to additional Tables, Columns and Generic Items! This is extremely useful because many times comments may related to multiple Columns or Tables or Generic Items, so why not link to them all in one step? This saves time and reduces the number of Comment records since one can link to hundreds of Items.
