Tagging additional information to scorecards via components

Posted by sw on February 23, 2010 under Corvu |

Often you want to tag additional information to your scorecard whether it is adding additional owners or areas of organisations against measures in your system.  Normally we simply create a drop down box in the application hierarchy but once the list gets long it becomes harder to manage and to order alphabetically unless you re-write the custom formula every time. 

Well there is a better way of doing this and I normally implement this process every time I am aware that the source list will change frequently and grow.

Scenario:  There are 45 measures in the system and each need to be associated with a coordinator and a deputy coordinator. Most of these names aren’t necessarily Corstrategy users and wasting licenses to add users for tagging information is not an option. The duties of Coordinators and Deputy Coordinators change frequently to different people, this will require accessibility of adding new users and display them alphabetically in the selection list.

 

Step One:
Visit your Hierarchy editor and set up a new component for example Team.

  

Create Pop-window:

Component Name = TEAM
Alias = Team
Table Name = c_TEAM
Description Field = Description
Code Field = Code

Once you save this information you will see a new component listed in hierarchy editor called Team.

 

Step Two:

Now visit your components area from your menu and you will see an entry for Team in your middle pane. Once you select it, you will see that there are no data against this component (on your right).

 

Now you have two options one where you can manually enter all the information by right clicking on the component name and selecting the option “Add” (again & again) or import all the information through a csv file once you compiled it, I will leave you to decide that.
Oh by the way, I am using Code for storing user’s windows login accounts and Description for storing the user’s name.  

 Code = wagenesh
Description = Shariq Wagener 

NOTE: Code is the field which will be stored in the database and Description is the fields which will appear in the dropdown list under CorStrategy. In future if you want to include this information in CorBusiness report, you have to either create a picklist based your Code i.e. username or do a data join against c_Team.
There is no restriction what the code need to be but something which is relevant to the topic and can be saved without a any spaces in between is ideal because it has to stay unique in the database.

 

Step Three:

Now go to your Hierarchy Editor, in the middle pane navigate to Application Hierarchies > Measure. In the Level Fields Pane (on the right), create a new field called Coordinators and type following information in your popup window. 

Description = Coordinator
Database Field = COORDINATOR_CODE
Field Type = String
Field Size = 100
Input Component = Choice
Default Value = %SQL(SELECT Description, CODE FROM c_Team Order by Description)%
Optional = Tick

 

 Click Save.

Now when you right click and edit a measure you will see the names under the component in an alphabetical order. Once you select a name and save the measure you will see that the username was actually saved in the database rather than the actual name.

 

Shariq Wagener