Blog

Created on Friday, 26 August 2005 15:09

Written by Larry Grey

With the move from Client/Server to web, the drilling functionality in nVision has suffered. There are two main issues that were introduced:

1. the fact that when invoking a drill, the user had to navigate himself to determine when the processing has completed, and then navigate to open the report.

1. the fact that there was no way of organizing the drilldown layouts to make them easier to find.

The first item was addressed in PeopleTools 8.42. However, the second one still remains.

Improving the drilling usability

I'm going to start this part of the posting by providing some information that will cause me to lose all credibility to the loyal readers of this blog: I'm the person who developed that god-awful drilldown page (and I'm very embarrased that it hasn't been replaced). As product manager at the time, I had a minimal development staff that I could dedicate to the development. Thus, I had two difficult choices available to me:

1. Not move nVision drilling to the web.

1. Move it to the web with limited functionality, pitching in wherever I could.

Therefore, in addition to managing the development of tree manager, query, cube manager, and supporting infrastructure to EPM, I jhad to develop the nVision report request page, the Scope page, and the Drilldown page.

So, you got me into this mess, tell me how to improve it

Well, I didn't quite get you into that mess completely. Those familiar with how drilldown navigation works in the client/server environment, you'll know that the navigation was an issue there, but that there were some options to give users control over the sequence of the layouts in the drilldown menu in excel.

Quick and dirty solution...

We'll start with the quick and dirty solution (i.e. no changes to the god-awful pages I created).

When looking at this problem, the best way to improve the drilldown navigation is to minimize the number of items displayed in the drilldown list page. Unfortunately, the financials application ships with lots and lots of drills. This is because they deliver drilldown layouts that nPlode two differen axes and hard-code the metrics that they display in the drilldown layout. This causes layout explosion.

One technique I demonstrated to the PeopleSoft salespeople was to throw away those layouts and develop layouts that did two major things:

1. nPloded on only one axis. Because nVision allows drilling from drilldown results, instead of nPloding on two axes, you can drill into one field, and the drill into the other. This reduces the permutations of layouts, because you're not creating a layout for every combination of fields, you're only doing 2 for each (one for going to details, and one for drilling down 1 level using the tree nPlosion nPlode to immediate children).

1. Maximize the inheritance of those layouts. Most people create drilldown layouts that have the amount field hard coded in it. This is because in order for nVision to know where to put numbers, there has to be an intersection between row specifications and column specifications. Instead of picking a field, like posted total amount for a column, my recommendation is to add business unit criteria, but to pick "selected field all values" for the criteria. Just about every data source for nVision has business unit in it, and by saying all values, all you're doing is identifying where to put the numbers.

In the end, my recommended methodology is as follows:

1. Create 1 layout per chartfield that nPlodes the rows for that field at the detail level. Here is an example of one.

1. Create 1 layout per chartfield that nPlodes the rows to the next level of your primary tree for that chartfield. Here's an example of one.

1. Create 1 layout per tabular listing you want to drill to (such as journal lines, employees, voucher lines). This will allow you to drill to the lowest level of detail for them. Here's an example of one.

More involved solutions

Another set of solutions is to modify the drilldown pages delivered by PeopleSoft. One solution could be as simple as giving users the opportunity to personalize the order of the layouts. Others could be more involved (such as adding functionality to identify whether a drill makes sense with a report and prune the list, and using metadata about the drill layout to categorize them).

We believe that this is the right solution in the end. This is why we have defined a set of nVision drill enhancements like that above. Our methodology is to capture the information that's in the excel nVision layout and store it in tables in the PeopleSoft system. We can then use that information to prune the drill list and organize the drill layouts. As part of this we also add the ability to personalize the set of drills. From the feedback we've received so far, this seems to be a very valuable thing for most PeopleSoft customers.
    

Labels: Drilling, nVision