4 Creating a Custom Application

When you begin working with Narrative Reporting, you can optionally utilize an application to manage the data, dimensions, and models. You can have one application per environment and have the choice of viewing and exploring a sample application that contains pre-defined dimensions, or creating a custom application.

• The Sample Application that is provided with Narrative Reporting enables you to see what a finished application looks like, experience how the dimension hierarchy and dimensions work, and provides practice working with a report package through Smart View. When you are familiar with the Sample Application functionality, you can delete it, and create a custom application. Learn more by reviewing Work with the Sample Application.

• The Custom Application enables you to immediately create an application that reflects the information you need for your organization. You can load your preformatted metadata flat files from an existing data source to populate the dimensions in your application. The dimension hierarchies and members can also be created and maintained manually using the Hierarchy Editor.

Only the Service Administrator or a user who has been assigned the Application Administrator Role can create an Narrative Reporting application. These users can also perform ongoing maintenance, such as creating, editing or removing models, dimensions and members, as well as importing and exporting data. Users that have the Administer Application Permission granted to them can also create, edit or remove models, dimensions and members, as well as importing and exporting data, but they cannot create a new application.

For detailed information on specific roles and the associated authorizations, see Create Users and Assign Roles.

The following tasks are required to create the custom application:

• Naming the Application

• Creating Dimensions

• Adding Models

• Load and Extract Dimension Members

• Deploying Models and Dimensions

• Load, Extract, and Clear Data

• Validating the Application

• Applying Security

Watch this tutorial video, you learn how administrators create and populate a custom application in Narrative Reporting. To create a custom application, administrators specify the application name; create dimensions and models, and load or manually add dimension members; deploy the models; load and validate data; and apply security.

-- Creating a custom application.