Blog

Created on Friday, 03 March 2006 12:20

Written by Larry Grey

Today, we are ready to announce availability of the Grey Sparling nVision Auto-Drill snap-on. From our previous postings on nVision and drilling, we've had lots of questions and interest related to the subject matter in them. For those who haven't read the entries, here is the most recent one.

As we spent time helping these customers out, we realized that there was an opportunity to provide a "snap-on" product that addresses these needs (especially since many of the suggestions we provided have development impact across reports that that leverage those suggestions). The idea is that this product is "install-and-go", allowing a customer to put it in place without having to set aside time in the project plan to implement it. It also means that you don't have to modify your existing nVision reports (or drilldown layouts) or write code (or complex excel functions) to extend your drilling functionality.

Product Features

This snap-on replaces the DrillToPIA.XLA. For those not familiar with the PeopleSoft-delivered DrillToPIA.XLA, it's an excel add-in that enables drilling from excel without having to install nVision on a client machine. Our product addresses the following limitations in the PeopleSoft-delivered drilling solution.

• Configurable Excel menu that lists out the drills that can be run (without having to get the list from a page). Click on the menu item, and the drill runs to window without any other user intervention.
• Rules-based layout picker. You can define a mappings between field or tree node values and drills to run. Double-click on any amount in your report instance, and the snap-on figures out which drill to run based on the context of the cell, and runs it without any user intervention.
• Drill to query from Excel menu. The snap-on automatically figures out, based on the number you're drilling from, the parameters to pass to the query (no need to build a hyperlink formula that has the parameter references encoded in it).
• Drill to PeopleSoft page from excel menu. Again, the snap-on automatically figures out, based on the number you're drilling from, the parameters to pass to the PeopleSoft page (no need to build a hyperlink formula that has the parameter references encoded in it).
• Drill URI substitution. Because the link to drill is embedded into report instances, you are stuck if for some reason, you need to drill from the report after your PeopleSoft web server URI changes. Although you could write a program to fix the NvsDrillHyperlink defined name, our snap-on allows you to fix this problem without having to modify the report instance XLS file.

What do you mean, "Install and go?"

Good question. "Install and go" means that you can take the software from us, install it, and start using it right away. Sounds great, right?

We've put a lot of thought on how you would deploy it, so that it is easy to get up and running. As such, the snap-on has the following components:

• PeopleSoft server-side logic to invoke the nVision drilldown without opening the delivered drilldown page.
• Excel add-in with all the client-side code.
• Spreadsheet with configuragle rules used to generate menus, override the URI, and pick drill layouts.

Wow, Sounds great, but it must be expensive

Actually, we've priced it low enough that most project sponsors can buy it within their purchasing authority. We believe that if customers like this product, that they'll come back for some of the products that have some change management impact (such as deploying report security).

If you want more information about this new product, feel free to contact us.

Labels- drilldown,nVision