In the upcoming 7.0 version of IBM SevOne NPM, you will notice a new icon on widgets as well as the new Instant Graphs page (more on that in another blog post). This little shopping cart icon represents the new Stash feature. In the following blog post you learn about the capabilities of this new feature, why we built it, and how it'll help you investigate and build reports faster.
Reshaping Detach
In the legacy NMS UI there was a handy feature called 'Detach'. This feature enabled you to take a visualization from certain views and copy it to a new report. We really liked the workflows that it enabled and we were excited to bring that functionality over to Data Insight in 7.0. We considered emulating the same behavior but we quickly became annoyed at the quirks and oddities of the original feature.
Some of the things we didn't like about it were:
- Not available in reporting, it's only available in Instant Graphs and Summary views.
- Can only detach to a new report; cannot detach to existing report or another report you're working on.
- Lacking in feedback when the detach happens, as the visualization silently lands on a new browser tab. If this tab is already open you cannot tell anything happened.
So we knew we wanted to deliver the good of the old detach feature but we also wanted to improve on the experience and avoid these shortcomings.
Introducing Stash
Stash is a feature new in 7.0 that provides you with a means to copy visualizations from Reports and Instant Graphs into a staging area we call the Stash. Visualizations can be pasted or rather, unstashed onto any report that you can edit. Visualizations can be unstashed all at once or you can selectively unstash one by one.
How to use the Stash
To store visualizations, simply look for the shopping cart icon on visualizations and click the icon. This will place that visualization into the stash.
After clicking on the icon you'll see a brief toast notification confirming that you stashed the visualization.
Now when you're looking at any report you can edit, you'll see the cart icon with a blue dot over it. Clicking on this button opens the Stash side panel.
This panel gives you a preview of the items you have in the stash. Many visualizations will look slightly different in this view so that they render better in this smaller window, but rest assured that the visualization will look exactly the same as it did on the report after it is unstashed. Within this panel you can unstash all of the visualizations, certain visualizations, or remove visualizations if you don't need them anymore.
Check it out in 7.0
IBM SevOne NPM 7.0 is scheduled to release this June. Stay tuned to this blog space for more updates to 7.0, especially the new Instant Graphs workspace. We'll be covering more about using the Stash feature in those posts as well as the many other exciting features coming soon in 7.0