Introducing Work Item Views

An explanation of Work Item Views and how to configure your Views.

About Views for Work Items

It’s likely that you will create many thousands of Work Items of different kinds (templates) which are for different purposes and exist at different workflow stages. For this reason, it is necessary to create filtered views of Work Items using criteria that enabled you to segment the information displayed on screen (after all, most screens cannot physically display more than 30-50 rows at one time). For this reason, Solarvista allows you to create as many “Views” as you need to quickly access filtered lists of Work Items that meet certain criteria. In addition, Views can only display specific columns, if configured, otherwise they display all columns within the types of Work Items.

NOTE: Views for Work Items operate slightly differently than for Data Sources. Work Item Views can display Work Items that are of varied Templates whereas Data Sources only display records from a single data source.

Configuring Views of Work Items.

To configure a View, you create an entirely new View or you can open an existing View and “duplicate” it (to copy the existing content) before you save it under a new name.

To create a new View of Work Items:

1. Click on the Main menu in the top left of the web portal and open the “All” view under “Work” section. The “All” Work Item View will display.
   1. Click on the “down arrow” icon on the left of the top menu bar. A slide in will appear titled “Select View” like the screen below
2. This slide in allows you to select related Views to the one displayed.
3. Click on the button, “Create New View”. The slide-in will update to a new page titled “Configure View”.
4. There several sections on this page:
   1. Name
      1. This will be the name displayed for the new View; it must be unique. Enter a new Name for the View.
   2. Display
      1. This section allows the newly created View to be linked to a ‘parent’ View so that it appears in the “View” sub-menu when the parent View is selected. In addition, this section allows an icon to be selected from a library of icons built into Solarvista.
      2. Click on the “Parent View” field. This will display previously created Views. If you wish this new View to appear on the sub-menu of another View you should select a view here. If not, it can be left empty.
      3. Click on the “Icon” field. This will display a slide-in to allow selection of an icon. You can also search for icon by typing in text in the box at the top.
5. Select an icon. The icon library slide-in will close.
6. Columns
   1. This section allows specific columns to be chosen and ordered.
   2. If you don’t wish to be specific about columns (fields) displayed, you may ignore this section. If you do ignore it, all fields will be displayed automatically.
   3. If you do wish to specify the fields, all fields will be removed from the view as soon as you first click the ‘Add Column’ button. Then you can add each selected field by using
7. To add specific fields as columns, you should select the desired field by clicking on the down arrow in the selection box.
8. To add more fields, click on the ‘Add Column’ button.
9. If you add a field in error, you can click on the small ‘minus’ button on the right-hand side.
10. To rearrange the order of the columns, click and hold the movement ‘pad’ on the left-hand side of each field.
11. Filters
    1. This section allows the view to be filtered using a selection of field criteria.
    2. You must select at least one Work Item Template. Click on the ‘Templates’ field. This will display all available Work Item Templates that could be included within the View.
    3. The remaining fields displayed in the section can be populated to apply filters based upon the assigned User, the workflow stage, the date modified and tags.
12. Query
    1. This section allows more advanced queries to be built. These are built up from Query Items, of which there must be at least one if this section is to apply.
    2. Each Query Item must have a field name, an operator and a value
    3. Click on the “Select field name” box to display all available fields from the selected Templates (only fields with data are displayed).
13. Select an operator such as equal, greater than, starts with or list contains.
14. Enter the value to use with the operator.
15. If you wish to add another Query Item, click on the ‘Add Query Item’ button.
    1. If you add a second Query Item, it is important to ensure that the Group Operator is set correctly. ‘Match All’ means that all Query Items must be matched whereas ‘Match Any’ means that any one Query Item must be matched.
    2. You can delete any Query Item by clicking on the ‘minus’ button to the right-hand side of each Query Item.
    3. Query Items can be placed into multiply groups, each with a separate Group Operator. To add a Group, click on ‘Add Group’.
16. To save the Query, click on the ‘Save’ button.

Continue the Using Work Items series with Using the Quick Filter in Work Item Views.