Creating comments in your Webintelligence report like in MS Excel

Welcome to this post! I guess you are wondering why you haven’t seen this feature before…That’s normal, it doesn’t exist, so we decided to create a little extension that will do the trick !

Here’s where to get it : Add Comment

I’ll go through some of the feature of our “Add Comment” extension :

* You can create / delete comments like in Excel

* You can create private or public comments on selected table cells, free cells or header cells

* You or other users can create multiple comments on the same cell, allowing discussion-like collaboration

*Users have the ability to insert a selected comment in the report, for printing purposes for example

*Comments metadata include user name, date / time of comment, value of he cell at the time the comment was created

*Persistence management (users can control whether they want to keep after refreshing the report)

Prequisites : WebIntelligence XI 3.1 SP2 (DHTML view mode) and up, Extension points enabled. For more info download samples and documentation Web Intelligence Extension Points

Important : Make sure to update the user.js and webiIntegration.js with the ones from the package.

Once you deploy the extension, a new icon will appear on the left panel of your webi viewer :

Now if you select a cell,  you will notice it is getting highlighted and an “Insert” button becomes available on the left panel.

By clicking “Insert”, you will bring an input form where you will be able to add a comment. As you can see the comment can be made private, or persistent after refresh

Now, after the comment is added, the report looks like this :

You will notice a little red triangle in the upper right-hand corner of the commented cell, notifying the presence of a comment. You will also see the comment displayed on the left pane, with the user who added it as well as the date of the comment.

Something to be pointed out is that the same users (as well as other users) can add comments to the same cell. Only the user who created the comment can delete it.

Another interesting feature is the capability to insert the comment inside the report itself, for printing purposes for example.

Just select the comment displayed on the left panel and the “Show in report” button will become available. The comment will also be visible if the report is saved it as PDF.

Now just drag the comment where you want it to appear in the report ! In the following screenshot, the comment dragged is shown in a yellow cell:

This extension answers a business requirement wanted by some of our customers and partners.

We hope it demonstrates usefully the capabilities of the Extension Points for filling gaps in the product and creating custom enhancement for Webintelligence reports.

Feel free to share it, reuse the code and develop other ideas based or around this sample.

Let us know what you think about this one and give us some ideas on what to develop next!

A bientot