Creating custom perspectives and event logs
When you create a perspective, your goal is to select a subset of the object types, event types, and relationships from the object-centric data model that is relevant to a process, or to another grouping that you want to analyze. You don’t need to include all the other object types that have a relationship with an included object type - just the ones that matter to your analysis.
Relationships and cycles
The collection of objects that you want to include in your perspective, might have relationships between each other that aren’t relevant to what you are analyzing. Identifying the relationships to use in the perspective is a key step in making your analysis work correctly. Relationships between objects and events explains how relationships work.
In the object-centric data model, there can often be multiple relationships between a pair of object types. Celonis needs to know which one is important to your analysis in order to construct the PQL query.
In some cases, a pair of objects can have two direct relationships that are relevant to the process you want to analyze. For example, you might be interested in both the requester and the approver of a purchase order. However, both the requester and the approver are represented by the User object type. If you want to use both of these relationships in your perspective, you have a cycle.
More commonly, a group of objects can generate a cycle between themselves. If you start from one object and follow the object to object relationships along, you can return to your starting point. For example, there’s a cycle between the Celonis object types PurchaseOrderItem, PurchaseOrder, and Contract in the object-centric data model.
To solve this issue, the perspective builder lets you create multiple copies of an object type, and embed them in the perspective as separate objects. For example, if the user is both a requester and an approver, you can have multiple copies of the User object type, including one as the original and the rest as embedded copies.
Embedding is most useful for relationships where one object type provides context for another. Embedded copies are only connected to the object type that owns the relationship, and do not have any object to object relationships or event to object relationships of their own. It’s just acting like an extra attribute of the object type you’re working with. This strategy is commonly used for master data objects (such as a user, vendor, or material) that add information to the object type you’re working with.
Building a perspective in Celonis
Follow these steps to create your custom perspective in the perspective builder. If you have any problems, check the solutions in Troubleshooting perspectives.
From the Celonis navigation bar, select Data > Objects and Events.
Select Perspectives in the top navigation bar.
Click Create Perspective.
Enter a name for the perspective and click Create. You can’t use spaces or special characters.
Pick one or several important object types from the dropdown to start your perspective.
Use the Display Options dropdown to select how far out you want to explore the connected object types. You can choose a different display option at any time if you’re seeing too many objects, or if you want to see more.
If you already know the objects you want to use in your perspective, choose the display option “Show only added objects” from the dropdown.
If you want to build your perspective by exploring related objects, choose the display option “Show adjacent connected objects” from the dropdown, which is the default. This option shows the object types that have object to object relationships to the objects you add.
If you want to see all of the objects you could use, “Show all connected objects” keeps on following the connections outwards. If you’re modeling a custom process, you can use this option to show all your object types. Don’t pick this option right away if you’re including Celonis object types in your perspective - it’ll make the graph very large. You can pick it when your perspective is complete to check for any objects that you missed.
Build out your perspective using one of these strategies:
Click Add object and search or browse for further object types to add to your perspective. You can select multiple object types or all of them.
Start exploring the connected object types, which are shown grayed out with a plus sign (+) for you to add them into your perspective if you want. When you add a connected object type, the perspective editor shows you the further object types connected to it.
Tip
You can change your display option at any time if you want to see more or fewer object types on the graph.
To remove an object type that you’ve added into the perspective, hover over it and click the minus sign that appears, then confirm in the pop-up that you do want to exclude the object type. Alternatively, you can click Add object and uncheck the object in the list of objects.
If you’re showing connected objects, the removed object goes back to being grayed out.
If you’re showing only added objects, you’ll need to add the object back in from the list if you need it again.
When you remove an object, any embedded objects related to it are removed as well.
Tip
All of the objects in your perspective must be connected - they must have at least one relationship to another object. You can add disconnected objects while you’re editing a perspective, but you won’t be able to save the perspective until you’ve linked them all in. The exception is the CurrencyConversion and QuantityConversion helper objects, and the master data object MaterialMasterPlant, which can be in a perspective without any relationships.
Click Select on each of the object to object relationships to choose a strategy for the relationships.
Ignore relationship means the object to object relationship is ignored by your perspective. You can still include the target object type in your perspective, but this relationship between the objects won’t apply. This is the default setting and “Select” is shown for the relationship when it’s set.
Include relationship means the object to object relationship is used in your perspective. You can only include one relationship between a pair of object types - if there are other relevant relationships between them, you’ll need to embed the target object type for those.
Embed means the object to object relationship is used in your perspective, but the object type that you’re embedding is included as a copy for local use only. If this is a two-way relationship, you can choose which of the two objects to embed. The copy of the object type is linked to the original object type, so it’ll be updated if that is. However, it isn’t shown in the list of object types for the perspective, and you can’t include any of its other relationships or create an event log for it. It’ll also be removed if you remove the connected object type from the perspective.
Tip
If you’ve created a cycle, the perspective builder highlights it. Click Cycle to edit the relationship strategies. You can break the cycle by ignoring some of the relationships or embedding some of the target object types.
When you’ve added all the object types you want in the perspective, and assigned a strategy for each relationship, set up any custom event logs that you want to create. Celonis automatically generates an event log for each object in your perspective, but you can set up others if you want to include further events that are indirectly connected to the lead object, through another path of object to object relationships. For each event log that you want to set up:
Select Event logs.
Click Add event log.
Name the event log. You can’t use spaces and special characters.
Select the lead object type that the events happen to. This object is the Case Key.
Select the events that are relevant for the process you are tracing.
Check the box for Set as default event log if this is the default case for the perspective.
Click Save.
Tip
You can edit or delete an event log from the context menu (the three vertical dots) next to the event log’s name.
When you've finished, select Save to save your work and exit the perspective builder.
Your new perspective appears in the list of perspectives in the Perspectives view. If you need to make any further changes to it, select its name and click Edit.
Select Publish > Publish to development to synchronize your changes to the development environment.
As with the perspectives for the Celonis processes, your custom perspective is published in the OCPM Data Pool in the Data Models section. Load your built objects and events into the perspective, then use it in your custom analysis. Loading and using perspectives tells you how to do this.
You can create a different event log or change your standard event logs on the fly using the PQL function CREATE_EVENTLOG. It’s better to use event logs that you’ve created in the perspective builder, because they’ll perform better and keep your analyses consistent, but you can use the PQL function if you aren’t able to go back and edit the perspective. See CREATE_EVENTLOG for the function documentation and examples.