Work areas

A Work area is a surface, or space, where you work with a selection of entities. You can populate a work area with entities in various ways. A common way is to search for entities. The result of a search is presented in a work area. You can also have two work areas open at the same time and drag entities between them.

You can save the result of a work area to a work area folder. You can either save the work area folder with a selection of entities or you can save a query as a work area folder. If you save the work area folder as a query, the result will be dynamic. Every time you open the work area folder, the query is executed and you will see the most up to date entity selection.

The most common places to work with work areas are in the Enrich Application or the Rich Client.

Work areas in the inriver Enrich application

Here are three examples of situations with work areas in the Enrich Application.

1. Work area as the result of a search or opening of a saved work area folder.

2. Two work areas side by side after splitting of a work area.

3. Work area to the left with an entity presentation in the main right area.

How to use work areas

Once you have a work area with some entities, there is a set of available commands to use.

Select or deselect all entities

 

You can select or deselect all entities in the work area. The selection can be used when you choose different options on the context menu to the right. You can also select/deselect individual entities by checking/unchecking them by clicking the upper left check box of the entity card.

View the entities in card view or table view

By default, entities are shown in Card view, which you can see in the screen shots above. But you can also view the entities in Table view, meaning that the entity information is presented as a table. Click on the Table view command to show the entities in table view.

By default in Table view, only the basic system information is presented in six columns:

1. Entity type
2. Name (the display name of the entity)
3. Description (the display description of the entity)
4. Completeness (empty if completeness is not set up for the entity type)
5. Created date (time when the entity was created)
6. Modified date (time when the entity was last modified)

Here is an example of the default table view.

As soon as you show the entities in table view, the command changes to Card view so that you can change the view back.

There is also a new option called Include fields available when you are in table view.

If you click this, all fields of the entities will show in columns. Here is an example.

Split a work area

A work area can be split in two work areas placed side by side, by using the Split command.

After splitting it can look like this.

Notice that the Split command is changed to a Close command. You can close any of the two work areas.

There is also a new command Active showing. You can select which of the two work areas should be the active one. The active work area is where entities end up if you do a search.

Clear a work area

You can clear all entities from a work area by clicking the Clear command.

The work area context menu

In the upper right corner you find the context menu of the work area.

If you have, as in the screenshot above, selected one or more entities in your work area, you get a few more options in the context menu.

Here follows short explanations of the menu options.

Open

A popup window opens where you can select to open any saved work area folder, personal or shared.

Edit query

This options opens the Query Editor. If your work area was based on a query, you can view and edit the query here.

Save

This option lets you save your entities in a new work area folder or update the result of an existing work area folder.

Create task

This option only appears when you have selected some entities. It lets you create a Task that will automatically contain links to the entities you have selected in your work area. For this to work, you must have link types defined in your elastic data model between the Task entity type and the entity type of the selected entities in the work area.

Export

This option lets you export the selected entities in your work area to a Microsoft Excel file. If you have not selected any entities, all entities will be exported.

Mass update

This option only appears when you have selected some entities. It opens the Mass update wizard that you can use to update fields of the selected entities in your work area.

Delete work area

If your work area is opened from a work area folder, this option lets you delete this folder.

Delete selection

This option only appears when you have selected some entities. It lets you delete the selected entities from the system. Be cautious, the entities get deleted, not just removed from the work area.

Remove from work area

This option only appears when you have opened an already saved work area folder and selected some entities. It lets you remove the selected entities from your work area. The entities are just removed from the work area, they are not deleted from the system. 

Further reading

Sorting the order of saved query results within a work area

When 'open in work area' in includes tab, entities are sorted in another order, why?

Creating a work area based on a query

Creating and saving work areas

Read about work area folders

Read about creating and saving work area folders

Read about working with work area folders using the remoting API