Graphical Explorer - Developer Perspective

Michael already showed some of the new cool features of our extended Graphical Explorer (GE) in his blog. Today I want to show you the GE from the developer perspective.

First of all I want to present you a screenshot of how the GE definition looks like in the iET Developer Studio.

If you’re already familiar with the GE, you certainly noticed that we didn’t change so much. The only change is marked in red on this screenshot. This inconspicuous property is very important for the GE because it has direct impact on how the GE looks like and behaves. You can select between Network or Process. Network is normally used if you want to display any kind of relations without a direct start and end point. The relations between CIs are a typical Network GE. But if you want to display e. g. Change Phases you have a start point as well as an end point. Here you should select Process as behavior value.

As in previous versions the GE bases on three views. Those views describe the edges (relations), the different types of edges and the nodes. You can define the underlying query to add nodes to the GE as well as the Node Expansion Mode. Furthermore you can define different texts which are visible for the end users while they are using the GE.

Now let us take a look on -let’s say- the more interesting part of the GE changes – the Edit Settings.

As you can see on the above screenshot here you can do a lot of settings which have a direct impact on how the GE will be displayed. With these settings you can control whether or not the GE is editable.

First of all you can define the Edge Maintenance Form with the corresponding Key Column. If you do not mark the option Allow Edge Creation the end user can’t create new relations. But he still can add and remove nodes and move existing relations to another node. With Show Maintenance Form you can influence how the above mentioned form will be handled. If this option is marked the form will displayed if the end user creates a new relation. If it’s not marked, the form will be run virtually on the iET Enterprise server.

If the end user adds a new node and “Expand Network of Added Items” is marked, the node will be expanded automatically. On both tabs “Create Menu Options” and “Add Menu Options” you can define toolbar menus that will be available on the GE for creating new or adding existing nodes. On the e.g. “Graphical CMDB” in the OOB ITSM you can only create and add CIs. But on the Change Phase GE you can create new phases and add phases, conditions and actions.

I hope my blog gives you a first idea on how the extended Graphical Explorer works and what cool things are possible. In an upcoming blog we will show you some of the OOB Graphical Explorers which will be part in the next ITSM release. So stay tuned!

Please feel free to comment this blog.

Best Regards,

Torsten