No, I’m not going all Shakespeare on you.
When Simplified User Interface or SUI was introduced, my first reaction to that was “Why.”
Why should I move to this new interface? (I could relate myself being in the same Smart View VS EXCEL add-in times, maybe this is not that worse).
You can hate SUI, you can call names (as I used to, I called it not so simplified user interface), and later fall in love with it.
We are still working on our relationship, but I can tell it is going in the right direction. This post is about some of those steps.
Some of you might have seen this in the May 2017 RCD which talks about a simplified dimension editor. I would like to call it a Web Planning Admin Extension 😉 (if you know what I mean)
How to access it (it is well hidden)
It is neatly documented in the Update document, here is a video if you are trying to find out how to launch it.
Couple of things that I noticed
- Still, doesn’t show all aliases
- As noted in the release document Start and End time periods cannot be set
- Renames are not possible
- Member moves still not possible
- Most important of all – same Excel extension features on the web
My recommendations
- Add a link in navigation (well that would make it not SUI) or as a card (we’ll talk about cards 🙂 )
- Add more features so that one day the classic dimension editor will become a thing of the past (Oh a man can dream)
Second in this “to SUI” post is about Navigational Flow.
I was working on a project where I was using the good old “Composite Webforms,” and I was looking for some creative options and was trying to see if I can use something other than regular Composite. (I didn’t want all the rules to get executed when I save data on one tab)
I got some guidance (I don’t want to quote names here 😉 ) and started looking at Navigational flows. I was already familiar with them.
I first saw that when I was playing with the LCM for this blog post – the one where Essbase data change was introduced, the second time I saw it when Opal posted about them here.
However, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to mimic the composite form using Navigational flow. ( I did make it work though). Let’s see how we can get this one mimic a composite form.
I want to keep my existing cards and clusters, all I did was to copy current navigational flow.
I removed the “Data” card from the flow and added a cluster called “Data Entry” into my newly created Navigational Flow.
A new card is added inside the cluster.
Select the “Page Type” as Tabular Page and Orientation as Vertical.
You can add new tabs to this card now.
I got stuck here!!!!
See where it says Artifact, that window and lens looked to me as disabled. It is not a disabled field (not sure why such a color scheme!!!)
You can click on the lens icon to select an artifact.
Here is my end replica of the composite form using Navigational flows.
I do like this one better.
- It only executes the rule where user save data, the tab which user is on (oppose to composite)
- I can add some icons 🙂
- The grid is pretty
The issue
- It is not available in Smartview
I hope either this makes to Smartview or Composite gets a facelift shortly. Oh, a man can dream!!!
