Is there an alternative approach to find and manage error workitems in the Workstep Contents report,

Alan Hitchings

By David Berglund

 

It takes a really long time to find and manage error workitems in the Workstep Contents report- we could have over 100,000 workitems in a given workstep so reporting could be very slow. This makes the process of, for example, releasing a handful of workitems from an error status a tedious operation. Is there an alternative approach to handling this, or tuning that can be done to improve performance?

This is typical behavior for the Workstep Contents report in environments where greater than 50k of workitems exist in a given workstep. The problem is that the Workstep Contents Report report first gathers information for all of the workitems in a Workstep, presents that to the user, then allows the user to filter and sort from there. The compilation, sending, and rendering of such a report when there are several thousand workitems is inefficient and unweildy.

This use case has been addressed in r10 with the introduction of a feature called the Advanced Locator. This feature is part of the Workflow Management section of the Execute360 Administration Website.

The Advanced Locator allows you to define a query for the workitems you are interested in, so that the initial report presented to the user is a far smaller result set containing only workitems relevant to what the Administrator want to see. The user can then work with this much more manageable list. Other features of this facility includes an ability to save the query, so that it can be readily run again at a later time, an option to determine a report row count before requesting the full result, and access to all available metadata associated with the workstep report upon which to based criteria (including dates, status, user, type, etc.)