Preparing your system for Longview Analysis and Reporting and Input

Use Longview Analysis and Reporting to view and analyze Longview data in reports. Use Longview Input to submit data to the Longview database.

Before the users of the application can start to work, the System Administrator must perform a few preparation tasks in Longview Application Administrator.

In this chapter, you can find information on these main topics:

• “Specifying settings in Longview Application Administrator”
• “Specifying attributes in Longview Application Administrator”

Specifying settings in Longview Application Administrator

Before users can use Longview Analysis and Reporting, your System Administrator must use Longview Application Administrator to specify the appropriate type of access for each user group. Only the System Administrator can perform this task.

Settings for Longview Analysis and Reporting

To use Longview Application Administrator to specify settings for Longview Analysis and Reporting, follow these steps.

1. If you are not already in Longview Application Administrator, start that component by clicking on its icon in Longview Component Manager.
2. In the Server Explorer pane, click on either Users or Groups, depending on whether you want to give permissions to a particular user, or to a user group. The list of existing users, or groups, is displayed in the work pane.
3. Select the user or group you want to give Longview Analysis and Reporting permissions to and double-click it to open its properties dialog.
4. Select the Authorization tab.
5. Select Application Access. The list of available applications is displayed
6. Select Longview Analysis & Reporting (if it is cleared) and select a role for the user or group. The choices are:

   Reporting role	Tasks
   Report Publisher	Sets the general content, criteria, and format of the report templates that Report Users use to analyze data and run reports.
   Report Author	Populates Data Views with data for analysis purposes, and then runs reports either individually or in batches.
   Report User	Uses the report templates created by the Report Publisher to analyze data and run reports.

7. When you are finished, click OK. For more information, see the Longview Application Administrator Guide.

Specifying attributes in Longview Application Administrator

It is your responsibility to prepare your Longview system to allow users to access the application components they require. In the case of Longview Analysis and Reporting and Longview Input, you need to prepare an attribute and a static schedule to permit a particular type of activity.

SGPFloatingTimePeriods attribute for floating time period symbols

If the users of the application have many standard reports that they want to reuse in the next calendar month or fiscal year, they can use floating time period symbols in these reports. A floating time period symbol ensures that they each show the correct month and year when the database is updated during a rollover.

For example, let’s say you have 100 reports containing year 2009 time period symbols, and you want to use these same reports in the year 2010. If you used regular time period symbols, you would have to go into each of these reports and manually change the time period symbols from 2009 to 2010. However, if you use floating time periods, the symbols update automatically when the database is rolled over to the next year.

When preparing a report in the application, you select time period symbols in the Symbol Selection dialog. You have the option of selecting either regular time period symbols or floating time period symbols.

An asterisk is added to the symbol name to identify it as a floating time period symbol.

To allow users of the application to use floating time periods, you must set them up in Longview Application Administrator.

To prepare floating time periods, follow these steps.

1. Find the attribute SGPFloatingTimePeriods.
2. Set the values for SGPFloatingTimePeriods as a list of attributes. The list consists of attributes that each represent one time period symbol that gets updated, either manually or automatically, during the various rollover processes (month-end, year-end, and so on). Separate each attribute with a pipe symbol ( | ). For example: SGPCurrentPeriod|SGPCurrentYear
3. Depending on the number of values you need to include, select the appropriate method.
   • If you use the Attribute dialog in Longview Application Administrator to set the values of the attribute, you are limited to a certain number of characters. If you exceed the maximum, the list is automatically truncated.
   • If you use a command and an ASCII file to set the values of the attribute, there is no limit.
4. Select attributes that represent a fully defined time period (for example, AYR10, P10Q1).
   • You cannot use attributes that represent only parts of time symbols (for example, 2010, 10).
   • You cannot combine multiple attributes that have partial time symbol names to make a full one.

UAccSchedules attribute to specify access to schedules

To give users access to schedules in the application, you must select those schedules for the attribute UAccSchedules set in Longview Application Administrator. You can select schedules individually or set the attribute to ALL to give users access to all non-system schedules.

Attribute symbol selection

When selecting both base and schedule symbols for Longview Analysis and Reporting templates, Publishers can select attributes instead of symbols. These attributes can be used to automate the subsequent symbol selections of other users.

For each type of attribute (System, Symbol, and User), there are 16 attributes corresponding to 16 dimensions, resulting in 48 attributes.

SGPD#AttrSys

SGPD#AttrSym

SGPD#AttrUser

where:

• # can be 0-15 representing each of the possible sixteen dimensions in a Longview system.