AWI search, statistics, hierarchical view, the whole shebang. Thoughts?

[Carsten Schmitz]

Hi.

I'm hoping to (also) get some attention for this issue by Robert_Schausberger_8294 or robert_thullner_automic or (not Robert ;) ) David Ainsworth or any product designer, but also spark a general discussion about this and hear your mileage.

I just spent 30 minutes on the phone with a user who had one simple question. He was looking for this:



The good news is: We found how to do this in AWI (took us about 10 minutes, in principle). Long story short, it works by setting a filter for a timeframe and (optionally) an object name in the Process Monitoring's first tab, the one that's called "Custom Filter", and in German is unfortunately named "Benutzerdefiniert", which does NOT mean "Custom Filter" by any stretch, but it means "User defined". Oh well.

Then, at the bottom of the filter list on the right of the screen, you tick this little box:



This will show active and inactive tasks in the screen that formerly was the Activity Window (and has recently been named "Hugo").

I have major issues with this. I'm not saying the design of AE10 was better - it was probably not. The search dialogs like the one for "Periods" looked isolated, out of place and bolted-on in V10.

However, I think AWI dropped the ball as well. Whether you consider "Hugo" the activity window or not, it's called the "Monitoring" perspective. But it suddenly is the place to look for past things, too, like things long ended and deactivated? This makes no sense. On top of that, you can reach the same window via the quick searches "Task" section, but you reach a very similar window (albeit the "Process Assembly" perspective) via the quick searches "Object" section - which also has a timeframe filter, but can not be used to search for "deactivated" tasks.

This is highly confusing to my users, and I agree. Why should I look for old status codes of activities that are long ended via Monitoring, but not via Assembly, when Executions (neé Statistics) are available via (edit: menu entries from) Process Assembly? This makes no sense.

I think, in fact, that a big opportunity has (thus far) been missed in this redesign. One could have done away with the split between "activities" and "statistics" altogether, and merged everything under one label. That way, you'd have active activities, and inactive activities, and deactivated (past) activities, of which the ones that still have full statistics and reports in the database have a "view details" option. And you had one, not two views with filter panes. Much more elegant and comprehensible than the cobbled-together current interface, me thinks. The line between those two has been bled to bits anyway, due to being able to search for deativated tasks in the former activity window.

Now, why did the call take 30 minutes if it took 10 minutes to figure out the intricaties of the searches? Good thing you asked! (I just assume you did ;) )

He had not yet discovered the tiny arrow to add more columns to results, which, granted, is a rather tiny heap of pixels, but mostly, here's why:



The two buttons there - it's "list view" and "hierarchical view".

Please let me know if your experience differs - are these buttons good for anything? The only way they ever come up in our company are sentences like these:

"Have you tried switching to (hierarchical / list) view? Yeah, we also don't know why, sometimes one works, sometimes the other"

Seriously, does anyone truly understand these? We spent 20 minutes fiddling with the other search options, and it turned out we would have seen our result, but did not see it because we were both in "hierarchical" view. Why, I ask, does a single job seemingly not show in hierarchical view at all, all other search options being correct? Once you switch to to "list view", the result shows. Does hierarchical view only list things matching the search filter that have a JOBP as a parent? Only if the JOBP also matches the search patterns. Sure, I could experiment with this, but honestly I can't be bothered, because:

If I select a JOBS in the filters, then the darn hierachical view should show it. For all I care, give me some hierarchy along with it, but don't just hide the darned thing entirely, that is confusing as heck for anyone involved. For all I care, as a quick fix, pop up a bar on top of the list that tells me that there are 56 (or whatever) results hidden because I'm in the wrong view mode, but don't hide the results matching the filters from view because of it!

Thanks!

[Michael A. Lowry]

Hierarchical view is counter-intuitive. Recently I was viewing the tasks in a queue, and some tasks that I knew were in that queue were not showing up. The reason was that the top-level workflow was running in a different queue.
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E.g., I was looking at queue XYZ in hierarchical mode, and workflow XYZ.WF2 was not showing up.

Hierarchical view of a queue displays only the child tasks of top-level workflows in that queue. It displays child workflows and their tasks even if they are in different queues.

In my opinion, hierarchical mode ought to be more intelligent than this. It ought to display the topmost workflows that are in that queue, and their children, even if they have parents in other queues.

[Matthias Schelp]

If I had one wish, it would be that list view is the default view when filtering.

[Carsten Schmitz]

Matthias Schelp said:

If I had one wish, it would be that list view is the default view when filtering.

If you had one wish, wish for three more wishes.

Then use one on Automic.

Amateur :D

[Carsten Schmitz]

If I can possibly get a PM to read this, please also note this related factoid:

If someone has one of these searches open (they sometimes take up to a minute or more, depending on your filters), there is an auto-refresh for the page, so the search gets repeated every few minutes.

Thus, if you have a bunch of people that happen to have this screen open, they can hammer the database just by virtue of being logged in.

This is not good(tm).

[Jeff Muller]

I was able to pull up a report with this information so I wanted to say thanks.  We did this in version 10 but I couldn't figure this out either.  I do have a problem though and that is we would export the report in version 10 so we would have a printable report.  I am not seeing how we can export this in version 12.1.  Any ideas on this?  Thanks.

[Larry Halseth]

Has anyone figured out a way to export executions? Or will it require a database query?

[Carsten Schmitz]

​Hi.

Please don't necro old threads.

As for your question, the answer is: Yes, there is a way - the Automic Web Interface in version 12.3 and above includes a button to export execution stats to plain text files. Before that, there is no such facility, and you'd need a database query (AH table).

Br,
Carsten

[Michael Pirson]

I finally got around to getting my V12.1.1 sandbox system up an running today. I was spinning my wheels trying to find the statistics window. As someone who has been using the AE everyday for years it is kind of rough that I had to read a thread on the community to look up statistics. I cannot wait to teach all the operators!

Also, if im understanding this correctly. I have to view Activities and statistics in the same window? yikes

Edit: Im about 2 hours into using V12.1 now... We are sure in for quite the treat  :)

[robert_thullner_automic]

I am sorry for my late reply to this thread. We are always looking for customers to provide valuable feedback to the AWI in order for us to improve it for future releases.

For AWI we never had the idea of just copying the rich client because it was heavily overloaded in some areas. On the one side this is advantage for really experienced users. On the other hand there were so many possibilities to solves things in many different ways in the rich client which was considered as too complex for novice users. 

A good example of this is the combination of the Activities and Statistics view. Here the goal was to have just one view to be able to see Activities and Statistics. What you already figured out is that this did not make through the whole product yet. That is why we still have the executions view in place. However, we collect the feedback and are considering following improvemens for upcoming releases of the AWI. 

• Get rid of the Execution view and directly link      to “Process Monitoring” with an preset filter which then shows you      exactly the same information as in the executions view before
• As soon as we us a filter view we will switch to      the list view by default
  
• Considering child task in the search      result if the user has the hierarchical view open.

These items are already on our backlog for the AWI, however at the moment we cannot tell in which version they will be added. 

We know that there are still differences between the old and the new UI but we always ask the question “What Problem or Need to you want to solve”. This often leads to different approaches than before because we can solve the problems and needs in a more efficient way than just replicating features from the old UI. 

I can ensure you that we collect all feedback from all customer interactions as well as from the community and evaluate it carefully. Based on that we add items to our backlog for the AWI and do our best to deliver as many items as possible within a release.