Been busy building a new SPM Portlet
Not a lot of blogging lately, because every now and again we get the privilege of doing some custom work for a customer, and we are flat out building a new replacement SPM 2.x portlet for them.
The customer needs the portlet to only show scorecards where values existed for the column sets selected (their scorecard hierarchy is quite volatile)
They also wanted to be able to provide some additional interactivity so we built it all in flash.
Gotta say (sorry flash portlet) that I have a new (portlet) love!
As you may know SPM doesn’t have any published API’s for portlets we could use so we extracted the SPM data into Oracle for this purpose. But I have been toying with creating some code in Mysql that would do exactly what we are dong in Oracle so it will work directly off SPM.
Any way (blowing our own trumpet) here is what the portlet does:
- Provide table and aggregated view in a single portlet as a edit portlet choice.
- Allows the users to tailor the portlet via flash based option pull down bar, even when published, including
- Scorecard via a hierarchy tree
- Measure group
- Column Set
- Date
- Table vs aggregate
- Search for a scorecard based on its name
- Allows users to click on a measure and see the scorecards/measures below that make that value up
- Allows users to drag and drop columns
- Allows users to sort columns by clicking on them
- Doesn’t show scorecards with zero values
- Has a flash graph (line and bar) based pop up window for each measure (and you can select only one measure not default to all)
- Allows selection of default or specific date
- Uses our WRV/WRS linkages tool with Portal Single Sign On (SSO) to allow uses to dril down on a number and showsa context sensitive (i.e based on measure, scorecard, period etc) parameter based WRV/WRS report
- In aggregation mode allow users to select to show parent scorecard or not
- In aggregation mode show multiple columns under each scorecard (rather than the SPM version of a single column for each scorecard then the next column for each scorecard)
- Allows users to drill down on a scorecard in aggregation mode
- Breadcrumbs that shows the hierarchy of the scorecard you have selected (i.e Parent > Child > Child 1)
Its so beautiful …..
November 5th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Surely you can’t blog all that without screenshots?! It sure sounds like quite a portlet, I can understand your starry-eyed-ness. Did the client come up with this spec all by themselves?
November 6th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
They gave us some directions on what they needed, then let us loose. We then delivered regular versions during development to get feedback and make changes as we went.
We have found this iterative/agile approach works the best for us and the customer.
The high level, rather than detail requirements also allows us to find quicker (i.e more cost effective) ways of delivering what they wanted. But the constant feedback is important otehrwise we would just go off and build what we thought was cool.
I will have to create a database instance with non customer data and then I can create some video demos of the portlet.
But as you can see from the state of our website, something else always seems to come up. Im planning on having a quiet xmas and doing some tidy up of the site and adding a lot more content.
November 6th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Some very nice ideas in there, sounds like your client is really onto it! Looking forward to the vids and screenshots.