Planning Workflow (9.3.1): how to influence the view of an enduser?

Question

Hi all,
In Planning (9.3.1) Workflow the administrator and planner views are quite different. Where the administrator sees a nice top-down approach when opening Workflow (in other words: an administrator can navigate from generation 0 down into the entity dimension) a planner always sees the level 0 members. All of them… which is not very handy.
How can we influence the way a planner (=account with role “planner”) sees his part of the Workflow? Now, if a planner has to see multiple departments, he can see 100s of cost centers in Planning, while just viewing and influencing the highest level depending on a person’s actual security (for instance a department as a whole) would be enough already.
There must be some place where this can be influenced within Planning, but we can’t find it in the documentation or in the standard interfaces of the Planning administration site.
Thanks in advance!
Gr.
Ivo

Answer 1

Hi,
some FM elements always need special treatment. This is true for graphics (objects), cross links and tables especially.
The EDD can do lots of things, but is also limited in doing others.
There are also different ways to reach a goal, depending on your preferences.
Some things have to be done in the template, some things need to be done in the EDD, others need to be done in the RWR.
It always depends on what you have as given input, how good your skills at certain things are, how consistent your input is or how the general workflow is laid out.
The best way to learn structured FM is to take a look on existing EDDs, DTDs, RWR and templates.
Check out how other people solved those problems. See if the same way works for you.
In your special case, my solution was the quick and dirty one. But there could have been another solution.
You could have wrapped your reference within a font formatting tag (such as <b> or <i> in DITA/HTML) and add the font properties there.
But introducing a font tag usually has influence on your XML input/output.
This means you would need to either get this information already within the XMl source, add it with XSLT on import (remove on export), redefine your structure or use FM scripting.
As you see, there are many ways leading to the desired output - it just depends on your special case, what is best for you.
-Alex