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Hello! As I continue to tinker with Aras Innovator® working on internal projects, I’m constantly discovering cool tips and tricks on how you can improve your user experience with our low-code tools. This blog will have three quick tips for configuring your instance of Aras Innovator to improve collaboration and visual clarity.
Reverse graph navigation direction
When looking at a Graph Navigation, you can move left or right (assuming horizontal orientation). Items that flow from left to right follow a standard or item property relationship. Items moving right to left use a referencing item relationship. This can make some Graph Navigation Views difficult to parse with left and right connections. I prepared a demo to show how it’s done and for visual quality. Read on to learn more.
Go to the TOC > Administration > Configuration > Graph View Definition. Open the Graph View Definition you’d like to modify the direction of. Open the Connectors tab. It should look like this
The important part of this is the Source and Target Node columns. Find the relationship you’d like to reverse the direction of by looking at the start/end query item. Once you’ve located the row you’re looking for, you can swap the values for the Source and Target Nodes. This will flip the direction of the connector, allowing for more easily digestible Graph Nav Views.
Label your graph connectors
Another way to add visual clarity to your graphs is to label your connections. It’s an easy way to ensure people understand the connections within your digital thread. This one has two steps. First, we need a View Card Definition with the following Template Definition. This definition is just a simple black line with a label affixed to it. Once that View Card is created, we’ll have to add it to our Graph View Definition. Open the Connector View Relationship.
You’ll have to add your new View Definition to the Connector View Column. This simply states that you want your connector to follow the definition we set previously.
The final step is opening up the Connector Type for the row you just modified. Under the Properties relationship, you can add a new Property called description (case sensitive), and in the value template, add the text you’d like to add to your Connector. When you open your Graph Nav View, you’ll see beautifully labeled Connections.
Auto-enable SSVC pane
This is a quick one, but it helps ensure people are aware of the discussion surrounding whatever Item they may be viewing at a given moment. Having the pane default to open allows any new discussions to be immediately visible to anyone viewing a given Item. To do this, we’ll take a look at the Part ItemType. Start editing the Part ItemType and open the Secure Social relationship:
Right click the Discussion Template and open the related item. You’ll see a Discussion Template with two relationships. Open the Discussion Template View tab. Here, you’ll see a single Item with a few properties. The important one is Discussion Panel Behavior. Editing this relationship and setting this to Discussion Panel On will make it so the discussion panel automatically opens when you open an Item. This is set on an ItemType by ItemType basis, so set it wherever you think collaboration could use a boost!
These were just three quick customizations you can make in your own system. Things that improve visual clarity and make things more apparent to users save everyone time in the long run. If you’ve made changes like this that improve efficiency at your company and want to share them, take it to the Forums! We’d love to see some of the amazing user-friendly customizations people have made to make Aras Innovator.
