Created Inquiry

The created inquiry is accessed after selecting the Execute Inquiry button on the Create Configurable Inquiry wizard page. The created inquiry can also be accessed by selecting the hyperlink in the Inquiry Name column on the My Configurable Inquiries (CIMYING) page. From the created inquiry page, you can make changes to the filters (must meet restrictions established on the Configurable Inquiry Business View page and in the config_inquiry.conf file), modify the format for selected fields, save the inquiry, and execute the inquiry. You can also share the inquiry and make a copy of the inquiry. Refer to the "Create a Configurable Inquiry Business View” and “Configuration Setup” topics in the CGI Advantage System Administration Guide for more information.

You must provide the desired values for required filters, then upon clicking the Apply button, the grid will display the desired results. The inquiry can be saved by clicking the Save As button. In order to generate the visualization, navigate to the Analytical View section and click the Generate button.

Print Page – This action can be used to send the page results to a printer.
Format Fields – This action is used to redefine the number, date, and currency data type fields.
Share – This action provides the ability to share an inquiry to other business users and roles. Alerts will be sent to those users to notify them of the shared inquiry.
Copy – This action allows the user to copy a saved inquiry in order to create a new inquiry. The user must save the new inquiry by clicking on the Save As button.
My Inquiries – This action allows users to navigate back to the My Inquiries page.

Manage Fields – Selecting this grid icon allows you to re-define the filters of the Configurable Inquiry.
Configure Search Criteria – Selecting this gear icon allows you to configure which fields should be displayed as search filters.

Advanced Grid – Refer to the Advanced Grid topic of this document for details on this feature.
Manage Aggregations – Selecting this grid icon allows you to define aggregation for columns available on the grid. The system supports all allowed aggregation types (Average, Maximum, Minimum, Sum, Median, and Count) for numeric data type fields and Count aggregation type for other data type fields.
Drilldown – This action allows you to see information at three different levels of granularity. Once you activate the switch, drill-down is applied to the first three non-measure (Varchar, Character, Date, Boolean, String, and so forth) columns of the grid. The breadcrumb component, available just above the grid, can be used for moving up drill levels. While drill-down is in effect, some of the actions (such as Search, Manage Filters, Manage Fields, Manage Aggregations, and so forth) will be disabled. These actions will be enabled once the drill-down is deactivated.
Standard Grid – This action is only available in drilldown mode. The icon will toggle back to standard grid view and deactivates the drill-down mode.
Sort All Records – This action allows users to sort the standard grid by three columns.
Personalize your columns – Selecting this grid icon allows you to re-define the result columns of the Configurable Inquiry.

Best Practices

Apply Aggregation to Amount fields using the Manage Aggregations feature for executed inquiries for seeing the summarized result.

Avoid having fields with Transaction level granularity (for example, Transaction ID, Accounting Line, and so forth) in the inquiry because it will fetch a huge number of records that makes it difficult to navigate to the required information and it is not performance friendly.

Use the Drill Down feature to effectively navigate from summary to detail level of information especially for situations that needs transaction header and line information (for example, Transaction ID, Accounting, Commodity Line, and so forth) in the inquiry.

Limitations

Sites will only see CI compatible models in the BI Model Name pick of the Create Business View (CIBUSVW) page. These models are preconfigured in config_inquiry.conf.

The InMemory models (suffixed as InMemory in the Model name) supports only the data that has been loaded into memory. Typically, this is the last three Fiscal Years of data and can be referred to as “Hot” data. Please refer to the “Special Considerations and Reporting Tips” section in the CGI_Advantage_Insight_4_Semantic_Model_Guide.pdf for a better understanding and details about the InMemory models.

The Available Fields in the Define Filters section shows only indexed fields (Amount fields are exception). This is to ensure optimal performance of the inquiry. Site defined indexed fields are not supported and will not appear under the Define Filters section.

The Field Level description information is not available for the Configurable Inquiry pages because the description information available to the system are Advantage Insight field names and not the Advantage database field names.

The Power BI query execution time and record count limit apply for Inquiry queries. The default limit is 1 Mn records but can be configured for the site. This parameter is configured on the Power BI services.

There is a system level control to timeout long running queries after two minutes. In this situation, the recommended option is to provide more filters to the inquiry.

Search values are case sensitive.

Capabilities

Number field filters support the use of conditional operators such as Less than (<), Greater than (>), Less than or equal to (<=), Greater than or equal to (>=), Number range (:).

Varchar field filters support wildcard searching using the asterisk (*) symbol. For example, if 01* is entered, the system will return records 0100 to 0199 and any records that have letters or symbols after 01.

By default, configurable inquiry grids are sorted based on rank placement of sortable fields from left to right on the grid.

In addition, a user has an ability to apply single sort or multiple column sort. This setting overrides default sort by the system and is retained during the Save inquiry option. If a change happens on the grid, such as add/remove columns or re-ordering via the user actions such as Manage Columns, Personalized Columns, Aggregation and so forth, the system switches to the default sort mode.