Blog

Created on Friday, 06 January 2006 14:00

Written by Larry Grey

Here's a neat tip that I wish I figured out when I was responsible for tree manager. Had that occurred, it would have been part of the product, versus a blog tip (oh well... you can't have everything).

I had a little help in figuring out this approach from one of our customers as we discussed the need to document the values in the chart of accounts for business users (using trees).

Chart of account listings
In order to make it easier for business users to understand the structure of the chart of accounts, especially when looking at individual chartfields, many customers have need to generate highly formatted reports, incorporating the trees. One of the major complaints about tree manager is the limited printing functionality available in it (and I can remember many long meetings trying to figure out a quick and easy way to deliver printing for large trees without writing a completely new tool to generate it).

Here is a quick synopsis of the major limitations of printing in tree manager.

• It cannot be run easily by users unless they manually open it up in tree manager.
• The results are generated in HTML in the browser, which means that the results have limited use and cannot be saved easily for future use (not to mention that printing large trees is a significant issue from the browser)
• It does not show the set of detail values in the system or any attributes of those values. This is critical when the audience needs the listing to document both the tree and the values represented in the tree (versus just documenting the tree itself).

With nVision, tree nPlosion, and nVision styles, it's possible to do all this without programming. A side benefit is that the resulting report could be used to drill into other detail (for example, one could look at the project report which shows all projects and activities hierarchically and drill into the journals posted to a given category of projects... Pretty Cool, right?)

Creating a tree/value listing report can be accomplished using the following steps:

• Build a query against the detail value table that the tree was built on. This query is merely to get the "facts" into the nVision report (much of the content of the report will come from the fact that you will be nPloding using a tree in it). As such, all it needs is the key and an aggregate field. Using Project as an example, the query would have the following:
  
  • The key field by which the tree would be linked. In this example, it would be Project ID.
  
  
  • An aggregate field that caused a count of the number of rows (values) to be displayed. PS/nVision requires this for matrix reports.
• Built a matrix layout in nVision for the report. Because the nPlosion rules cause the tree/dimension to be linked into the report along with all fields available in the tree/dimension and detail values, much of the content of the report will be the nPlosion and labels of values in the tree and detail value table.
  • nPloded the rows on the appropriate tree, using full tree nPlosion to detail values.

• Set the source of the sheet to be the query that was created.

• Labeled the first column to show the tree node ID and the project id

• Labeled the second column to show the tree node description and the project description.

• Labeled the third column to show the project manager.

• Labeled the fourth column to pick the count field from the query as the source
• Applied the stylesheet to the report in nVision.

This report can now be generated through nVision and distributed to the users using standard reporting tools.

Labels: nVision, Tree_Manager