19 Defining Alternate Views and Viewpoints

Alternate views and viewpoints let you see enterprise data organized in a different ways.

When you register an application, a default view is created automatically. This default view contains viewpoints for each bound dimension in your application, and therefore the default view enables you to work with all of the data in all of the dimensions in a hierarchy structure that matches the structure of your external application.

But what if you want to see this hierarchy structure organized in different ways? Or you want certain users to work with a subset of data in an application? Or perhaps you want to work with data from more than one application at the same time? For these use cases, you can create alternate views and viewpoints.

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Defining Alternate Views

There are two main use cases for creating a view that is separate from the default application view:

• You want to create a dedicated view to have specific users maintain specific data sets without having full access to all of the data in your application.
• You want to create a master view that contains viewpoints from multiple applications. Then, you can make changes in your master view and use subscriptions to push those changes out to the subscribing viewpoints (see Subscribing to Viewpoints).

This alternate view provides several more flexible options to work with your enterprise data:

• You can add viewpoints for only the dimensions that you want to maintain in that view (see Creating a Viewpoint).
• You can set specific permissions on that view that are separate from the view permissions on your default view (see Security for Views and Viewpoints).

Defining Alternate Viewpoints

With alternate viewpoints, nodes can be aggregated, rolled up, or summarized using a hierarchy that differs from the hierarchy in the bound viewpoint. In other words, alternate viewpoints let you group lower-level nodes under top nodes other than the top nodes in the bound viewpoint.

The following list describes some common reasons for creating alternate viewpoints:

• Group nodes under different parent nodes while preserving existing parent-child relationships. For example, you can create hierarchies that group cost centers by geography, function, and legal entity.
• Examine how a hierarchy and its associated data would be impacted if nodes are rolled up using parent-child relationships that differ from those in the bound viewpoint.

  For example, you could use an alternate viewpoint to analyze the impact of splitting a business unit into multiple units. You could then export the alternate viewpoint to an external application in order to evaluate the impact to the associated data.

• Define a hierarchy to be used in a report.