Understand basic text mode for groupings

Transcript

Hi, and welcome to Basic Text Mode for Groupings. In this video, you’ll learn what text mode is, what camel case is, and some basic plug and play text mode that you can use in report groupings. If you already know what text mode and camel case are, you can skip right to the Plug and Play section. It starts at the How to Remove Name prefixes on Groupings slide. Many report writers use text mode in Adobe Workfront because they’ve exhausted their resources with the standard builder, and in some cases still don’t have the report they need or want. Although text mode is not a cure-all solution, it does allow you to get around some of the limitations that you may be experiencing through the standard builder. Click on New View. You’ve seen how columns and views are created in the standard builder by clicking on New Column and then using a drop-down menu to select the available field. The standard builder simplifies the reporting tool, but because of that simplification, it can be limited. It actually doesn’t have all the fields that could be used in this list here. That’s why you may want to look to text mode to expand your options. The system reads the information you put into the standard builder and puts it into a code for Workfront to read. This is text mode. All of the same components are there. They just look different. The thing to keep in mind when working with text mode is that fields are written in what is called camel case. That means the field is written with a mixture of upper and lower case letters and no spaces. Workfront uses camel case to string words together in text mode, and most of the time what you find in the standard builder would be similar in camel case. For instance, this is how planned completion date looks in the standard mode, and here’s what it looks like in camel case. Here’s budget status in standard, and here’s budget status in camel case. There are some fields in the standard builder that have a camel case equivalent that doesn’t follow these rules exactly, but they’re usually pretty easy to recognize and they still were referred to the standard builder field. For example, duration in minutes is duration minutes in camel case, and external reference ID is X ref ID in camel case. A list of fields can be found in the API Explorer. You can learn more about the API Explorer in the advanced reporting tutorials in Experience League, and that’s a good place to go to find a link to the API Explorer.

The advanced reporting tutorials teach you more about text mode than we can do here. They contain five and a half hours of video instruction and a manual that you can download. Here we’ll just show you some handy text mode code you can plug and play without having to take the advanced course. Here are a couple of plug and play text mode code blocks. The first one isn’t really a plug and play thing, but I think you’ll find it’s pretty handy to know. Here we have a report grouped by team name. There’s an easy way to remove or change prefixes on groupings. You just need to edit them out using text mode. We’ll go in and edit this report. Go to the groupings and click switch to text mode. All we have to do is change the group zero name key field, and that’s this right here. To remove this name altogether, we can just change this to group zero name equals.

Now we save this. There’s no name in there at all. If you want to put some name, some different name, you can do that as well. Let’s go back in here. And we’ll put name, and then whatever we type in here is what it’ll show. Plus it’ll put that colon in there still, but there’s no way to get rid of that. You can at least put some other word in there if you want to. Suppose that in your organization, you use many levels of sub tasks. In some cases, sub tasks have the same names and can only be accurately identified by the parent tasks they’re associated with.

So if you watch the basic text mode for views, you recognize this view here of the 4 parents view. Let’s say that your boss wants you to come up with a task grouping that will group based on all the parents of a task up to four generations back. Your boss wants all the parent tasks to show in the grouping bar separated by commas. If there’s a grouping with fewer than four generations, your boss wants to only have the actual parent shown and doesn’t want to see a lone comma in place of a blank parent. So here’s the view that will do that. It’s called the 4 parents grouping.

And you can see that it’s got what your boss asked for.

Multiple parents and where there’s no parents, no comma just left there.

So how do you get that? How do you make it? That’s what we’ll go do right now. Create a new grouping.

We’ll call it another 4 parents grouping.

I will switch to text mode. And. Read it, whatever’s there.

And then go to our tutorial. Copy the text mode code block. And we’ll plug it in.

Save the grouping. And there you go. Be sure and check out the additional plug and play text mode groupings in this tutorial text.