View customizations
The following sections contain a look at the best practices on how to customize the application. In general, only the updates on the tabs structure are performed in the “Process Cockpit'' or "Validation Cockpit" views. All other updates are performed in the Base views or in the content views (=Tabs) embedded in the “Process Cockpit'' or "Validation Cockpit" views.
If something should be updated throughout the whole application, one of the Base views is the place to start in most situations (= bulk update). If a specific view should be customized, the content view itself is the place to go (=individual update).
Base Updates (Bulk Update)
As all components and layout in the Base View are inherited by the extending Views, all updates performed in the Base View are populated to the extending views.
If the extending views have already overwritten the configuration or the layout, the update is ignored in the extending view. This makes updating the Base a powerful way to change general patterns in the application.
Take a look at the following examples:
Update Layout
Assume that the KPI List should be removed for all Process Cockpit Views.
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Navigate to the Base View “Process | Base” and click Edit Mode.
Navigate to the KPI list and click on the “eye” saying “Hide section”.
Click Save and leave the edit mode.
If you navigate to the extending views (e.g., Excess Stock), you will see that the KPI list is gone.
Update Components
The process for updating components works very similarly. So let’s assume you want to adjust the KPI list not to show some KPIs.
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Navigate to the Base View “Process | Base” and click on Edit Mode.
Navigate to the KPI list and click Edit Component.
Click Hide for the items you want to hide.
Click Save and leave the edit mode.
If you navigate to extending views, you will see that all extending views show only the KPIs defined in the base view.
Extension Updates (Content View)
While the updates in the Base views provide potent updates to the general structure, it is still important to customize the individual view to show the most relevant information.
While the App does not do this out of the box, it is entirely possible to have different layouts across tabs.
If specific views should be updated individually, navigate to the Tabs folder and look for the respective view.
Creating a new Extension View from a Base
To better understand the advantages of the Base/Extension concept, the following section explains how to create an entirely new view focusing on a specific set of KPIs as defined in the Knowledge Model. Therefore, the previously mentioned methods around Base/Extension Views are used to build a new basic view.
To simplify the process, the following example shows how to use some existing KPIs coming from the Knowledge Model. This will result in a view allowing the business user to analyze the development of the “Supplier Reliability” as well as the “Amount affected Purchase Orders”.
This will also work with any other KPI created in the Knowledge Model.
To do this, create a new view called “Supplier Reliability” (as an example) in the same package where we store the other views of the Starter Kit App, by clicking on the “+” icon in the Tabs folder.
Select the Knowledge Model from the dropdown and select the View “Process | Base” as the Base View for the new Extension View. Once the Base for the “Supplier Reliability” view is selected, click the Create button to show an exact copy of the base view in Edit Mode.
Switch to the YAML editor by clicking on the “</>” button in the upper right corner to open an empty view without any Layout or Component definitions. All components in the View are inherited from the Base View. Nothing was overwritten by the Extension.
To adapt the content to show the mentioned KPIs, change/add a few KPIs in the components, including:
KPI List
Trend Chart
Drilldown table
Once these changes have been made to the Base View, you can add new tables or charts depending on what you want to show in the Order Returns Process Cockpit View.