Approval Processing

Add Completion Steps Via Model

iWise Relationships

List Hierarchy

Calculate Costs

Create/Display Request

Display Assignee Group

Display Cause Change

List Scheduled Locations

Export


iWise Tips & Tricks

The following are some tips and tricks to help you in using iWise applications. If you have any suggestions or additions to this list, please use the contact page and send them to infraWise.

Poor Man's Reporting

Do you have a Search Results List table on which you'd like to do some simple analysis but don't have ready access to the report functions?  Consider exporting the table into, for example, an EXCEL spreadsheet and using the EXCEL Pivot Table feature to perform the analysis for you.  Without getting into a Pivot Table tutorial here, the steps are:

  1. Perform your search
  2. Display your search using your table view
  3. Make sure that all rows have been fetched (do this by sorting a column or scrolling down through the table)
  4. Export your search results to a file (watch what it is called and where it goes!);
    You may need to "scrub" your data to make it easier to manipulate
  5. Open the file with EXCEL or another compatible spreadsheet program
  6. Use the spreadsheet analysis tools (e.g. Pivot Tables) to process the data

Assuming you have exported the proper information, Pivot tables can be used, for example, to find quick averages of outages by severity, counts of records by problem resolvers, or counts of severity by product.


This "Poor Man's Reporting" process can be the first step in helping to determine useful, new formal reports that your organization may need.


Shortcuts

Consider designing a shortcut for any action that you find you are performing repeatedly during a session.  For assistance in designing shortcuts, please refer to Creating A Shortcut in the iWise online Help. For example, to locate open problems, open the iWise Personal Shortcuts dialog box, and Click: New....  Next to Command string, Enter the following reply sequence: search stac/open typr/problem.  Next to Shortcut name, delete any existing text and enter "Open Problems" or the desired shortcut name. The name must be unique. Click: Add. The shortcut is now available under the Shortcuts menu on the menu bar.

Referencing Shortcuts in Other Shortcuts

Shortcuts can reference other shortcuts.  For example, if you wanted to find only your open problems, you could add a shortcut of search+pera/name (where name is your user name) and call it "Mine."  Then you could create another shortcut and simply enter Open Problems, Mine. See the tip above for the first shortcut.  Name this shortcut something like "My Open Problems." When you invoke it, iWise actually performs two searches.  First iWise executes the search defined by your first shortcut, the open problems.  Then it finds the problems you entered within those open problems.

Be careful of looping (i.e., shortcut A references shortcut B and vice versa, which will send iWise into an endless loop).

Sorting Search Results Lists (Part 1 - Simple Sorts)

iWise allows you to sort a search results list by clicking on the column header. Click on the header and it sorts the rows in ascending order by that column.  Click on the header again, it sorts descending. Click again and iWise sorts ascending, and so on.

Note: Each time you click on a new column, iWise will start the ascending/descending count over again, so if you click on Column 2, it is sorted ascending. Click on Column 3 and you get Column 3 sorted ascending.  Click on Column 2 again and it sorts that column ascending again because you clicked on a new column (Column 3) in between the two clicks of Column 2.

Sorting Search Results Lists (Part 2 - Complex Sorts)

Sorting preserves the order of the columns, so if you have two rows with the same value when sorting, the row that was higher in the search list before the sort will end up higher in the result. This allows you to do a "sort within a sort," such as all items sorted by increasing time within the same date.

Sorting Search Results Lists (Part 3 - Non-Intuitive Sorts)

Sometimes you will have to sort rows in a non-intuitive manner.  This may happen when you want a minor column sorted in increasing order but the major sort (the last one) in decreasing order.  Sort Descending actually does a Sort Ascending and then reverses the rows, so to preserve the increasing order of the first sort, sort it descending, too.  It sounds more complex than it really is.  So to get, for example, increasing time within decreasing days, first sort the time column decreasing (click its header twice) and then sort the days decreasing.

Using the Microsoft Visio Organization Chart Wizard to Produce Org Charts from iWise Data

Generate a comma-delimited text file in the format below: 

Unique employee ID,Employee name,Title,Reports to
00000001,Big E. Fries,CEO,
00000002,Todd Smith,CTO,00000001
00000003,John Doe,VP Software Development,00000002
00000004,Tommy Atkins,CFO,00000001
00000005,Joe Schmo,Project Manager 1,00000003
00000006,Jon Smith,Project Manager 2,00000003
00000007,Jerry Q. Public,Project Manager 3,00000003

Notes:

To generate the chart using Visio 2000:

  1. Open Visio.
  2. Create a new document, selecting Organization Chart Wizard.
  3. When asked, you want to create your organization chart from data that is already stored in a file. Click next.
  4. When asked, your data is stored in a text file. Click next.
  5. Enter the filename that contains your organization chart data. Click next.
  6. In the 'Name' dropdown, select Employee name.
    In the 'Reports to' dropdown, select Reports to.
    In the 'First name' dropdown, leave None selected.
    Click next.
  7. Select the information you want to display in the shapes on the chart. Click next.
  8. Answer the remaining questions and click finish to generate the chart.
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