Flow Toolbox - any ideas or feature requests?

[Harvey]

Just a heads up for those interested that there are upgraded Flow Server Manager and Window Manager released today. I have tried to incorporate as many features and bugfixes as possible from launch thread over in Useful Code & Tips.

For those of you that have joined up, the new release of the Flow Model Packager should be released this week in time for your partner kits.

I thought I'd also take this opportunity to get users' input. I want to run Flow as a collaborative workspace where anyone can contribute ideas and feature-requests. I will be setting up an official "issue tracker" site in the next couple of days to house detailed issues for each tool, but I thought I'd put the general question out there on the forum too.

What features would you like to see in the Flow Toolbox Suite? Any good ideas can be incorporated, and if you've played around with the Flow Model Packager beta trial, you'll know there's a lot of potential there for cool stuff!

If you have any ideas, feel free to post them here. I'll be monitoring the thread.

[olapuser]

Hi Harvey,

First, Thanks for the tools.

For Model Packager, it would be good to be able to select TM1 Objects that i need to make snapshot or deploy instead selecting all and deploy all.

Say example, i am creating one new cube in development environment and i like to make snapshot for that only one object and deploy to production environment.

I think with this feature, making snapshot or deploy would be much faster.

Regards,
Ricky

[Harvey]

Hi Ricky,

Glad you're trying out the tools!

You can limit the object included in the snapshot file in a few different ways. The first is to expand the Database/Cube/Dimension options in the snapshot creator screen. This will filter by object type and various other properties.

Model-Packager-Create-Large.png (40.1 KiB) Viewed 3008 times

Once the snapshot creator has completed, you get an xml view of the data returned. Within this screen, you can turn on and off particular nodes in the xml using the checkboxes to the left of the text. In this way, you can exclude entire cubes, dimensions, or any combination that makes sense.

Model-Packager-Xml-Review.png (61.72 KiB) Viewed 3008 times

Once you have your two snapshot files ready for comparison, you can create a deployment package. This functionality is disabled in the current version, but will be enabled for Flow partners in the next release.

Here you get the option to uncheck any detected changes that you'd like to exclude from the deployment package. So if you need to, you can remove objects before you deploy.

I have plans to make it possible to save "templates" of these inclusion/exclusion patterns to make repetitive deployments easier, so watch for that in a future version!