Managing Projects

Searching

Searching for projects is accomplished by using the filter box in the lower left of the hierarchy. The search filter will search project names and labels for matches and show the results in the hierarchy above.

Creating New Projects

To create a new project:

1. Open Analyze
2. Select “Projects” from the top menu bar
3. Click the “New Project” button
4. Complete the form information including the “Access Control” section
5. Click “Create”

The project is now ready for updating access permissions, adding owners, and creating workflows.

Automatic Change Tracking

All changes to a project, including workflows, data editors, hierarchies, table structures, and UDFs are tracked and allow point-in-time recovery of the state. This allows for easy recovery from user introduced problems or simply copying a different point-in-time to another project for comparison.

In addition to overall tracking, projects and their elements also allow for versioning. Not only is creating a version easy, you can also merge changes from one version to another. This provides a simple way to keep track of snapshots or to create a version for development and then be able to merge those changes into the non-development version when you want.

Managing Project Access

Types of Access

Project security has been simplified into three types of access:

• All Workspace Members
• Specific Members Only
• Specific Security Groups Only

Setting the project security is easy to do:

1. Open Analyze
2. Select “Projects”
3. Click the edit icon of the project you want to restrict
4. Choose desired restriction under “Access Control”
5. Click “Update”

All Workspace Members

“All Workspace Members” access is the most simple option since it provides access to all members of the workspace and does not require any additional assignment of members.

Specific Members Only

“The Specific Members Only” access setting requires assignment of each member to the project.To assign members to a project:

1. Open Analyze
2. Select “Projects” from the top menu bar
3. Click the members icon
4. Grant access to members by selecting the check box next to their name in the “Access” column
5. Click “Update”

For clouds with large numbers of members, this approach can often require more effort than desired, which is where security groups become useful.

Specific Security Groups Only

The “Specific Security Groups Only” option enables assigning specific security groups permission to access the account. With access restrictions relying on association with a security group or groups, the administration of account access for larger groups is much simpler. This is particularly useful when combined with single sign-on automatic group association. By using single sign-on to set member group assignments, these groups can also enable and disable access to projects implicitly.

To edit assigned groups:

1. Open Analyze
2. Select “Projects” from the top menu bar
3. Click the security groups icon
4. Grant access to security groups by selecting the check box next to their name in the “Access” column
5. Click “Update”

Setting Different Viewing Roles

Many times a project may require several transformations and tables to complete intermediate steps while the end result may end up only consisting of a few tables. Members do not always require viewing of all the elements of the project, sometimes just the final product. PlaidCloud offers you the ability to set different viewing roles to easily declutter and control the visibility of each member.

There are three built-in viewing roles: Architect, Manager, and Explorer

The Architect role is the most simple because it allows full visibility and control of projects, workflows, tables, variables, data editors, hierarchies, and user defined functions.

The Manager and Explorer roles have no specific access privileges but can be custom-defined. In other words, you can choose which items are visible to each group.

You can make everyone an Architect if you feel visibility of everything within the project is needed; otherwise, you can designate members as Manager and/or Explorer project members and control visibility that way.

To set the different role:

1. Open Analyze
2. Select “Projects”
3. Click the members icon
4. Select the member you whose role you would like to change
5. Double click their current role in the “Role” column
6. Select the desired role
7. Click “Update”

Managing Project Variables

When running a project or workflow it may be useful to set variables for recurring tasks in order to decrease clutter and save time. These variables operate just like a normal algebraic variable by allowing you to set what the variable represents and what operation should follow it. PlaidCloud allows you to set these variables at the project level, which will effect all the workflows within that project, or at the workflow level, which will only effect that specific workflow.

To set a project level variable:

1. Open Analyze
2. Select “Projects”
3. Click the Manage Project Variables icon

From the Variables Table you can view the variables and view/edit the current values. You can also add new or delete existing variables by clicking the “New Project Variable” button.

Cloning a Project

When a project is cloned, there may be project related references, such as workflow steps, that run within the project. PlaidCloud offers two options for performing a full duplication:

• Duplicate with updating project references
• Duplicate without updating project references

Duplicating with updating project references means all the related references point to the newly duplicated project.

To duplicate with updating project references:

1. Open Analyze
2. Select “Projects”
3. Select the project you would like to duplicate
4. Click the “Actions” button
5. Select the “Duplicate with project reference updates” option

To duplicate without updating project references means to have all of the related references continue pointing to the original project.

To duplicate without updating project references:

1. Open Analyze
2. Select “Projects”
3. Select the project you would like to duplicate
4. Click the “Actions” button
5. Select the “Duplicate without project reference updates” option

Viewing the Project Report

When a project or workflow is dynamic, maintaining detailed documentation becomes a challenge. To help solve this problem, PlaidCloud provides the ability to generate a project-level report that gives detailed documentation of workflows, workflow steps, user defined transforms, variables, and tables. This report is generated on-demand and reflects the current state of the project.

To download the report:

1. Open Analyze
2. Select “Projects”
3. Click the report icon