Thursday, March 13, 2008

UPDATED - Links Can Enhance the ITM User's Experience

I know, it sounds like the title of some email that your spam killer dropped before getting to your inbox, but as corny as it sounds there are ways to customize ITM to better suite the user's needs. One of these ways is by using links in your TEP workspaces. In this article I'll demystify links and discuss their use.

There are two types of links in ITM 6 - simple and advanced.

Simple Link
Basically an HTML link from one workspace to another. Click the link in a source workspace and it takes you to a target workspace. The navigator basically does the same thing, only with simple links, you can link charts, navigator items, tables and graphical icons to a specific workspace that you create.

Advanced Link
This is the same as a simple link, only it allows you to pass data through from the target workspace to the source workspace through something called a link symbol. A link symbol is like a variable or place holder that you create, and data gets passed into it from the source workspace.

Uses
From your graphical view, you could have a representation of your company by application, for example, and create links on each application icon that takes the user to a more detailed workspace for each application.

From a multi-result row query from a UA, you could create advanced links to pass the data returned by the UA you wrote to a target workspace you create, and have the target workspace filter on that data only. You can get even more creative and manipulate the data being passed dynamically.

Advanced links can minimize the number of workspaces you need to create by making them more dynamic. So it's more than just a fancy term.

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