What is a panel?
A panel is a type of interactive screen that pulls all the functions you can perform on one particular type of data (i.e. entity) into one convenient central place.
Within the panel you can create new items, edit and delete existing items, run reports and show the data from various points of view.
If we take ‘Assets’ as an example data entity, from within the ‘Assets Panel’ we have a rich toolbox of functions available including:
- Create a new asset
- Edit an existing asset
- View Asset activity
- View Asset change audits
- View Asset details
- Add/View Notes about the Asset
- Add/View Attachments (e.g. pdf documents, images) of an Asset
- Re-value an Asset
- Dispose of an Asset
- Report on the Asset Ledger
With everything located in one data-centric panel, there is no need to navigate menus to find ‘this report’ or ‘that function’ as we’ve published everything that relates to a given entity within the panels.
Watch the video below for an overview of panels.
How to navigate a panel.
There are basically two ‘sections’ to a panel which are creatively referred to as the panel ‘left-side’ and ‘right-side’.
Panel Left-side
On the left side of the panels is a list of items (or records) presented in a grid (row/column) format.
This list can be the items that you have worked on recently, the result of a database search (query), or some pre-determined filtered list. Once the panel has a list showing, you can then use the data in the columns to filter the items shown.
At the top of the panel’s left side is a strip of tools which gives you access to:
- search and filter capabilities (to change the list)
- refresh list
- menu of functions
- new items
- report launch menu
Note also that the panel’s left-side can be collapsed (hidden) to increase the available space on the right-side panel to give you more width to view the details of a given item(s).
Panel Right-side
While the panels left-side shows many data items, the panels right-side, for the most part, shows the details of one selected item.
In the strip of tools at the top of the panels right-side there are buttons to move forward and back through the currently presented list and a menu of functions available within the panel.
Each function on this menu opens a new ‘tab’ in the right-side panel filled with the data of the item currently selected for viewing. Note: the items Code and Description appears at the top of the panels right-side in the header bar.
Please refer to Functions for a guide on navigating functions within a panel.
At the far right of the right-side toolstrip, there is a question mark icon which is used to access help about the panel and its functions.
Note: depending on what ‘role’ you are assigned to, you might not have access to the full set of functions available in a panel. Which means you could have one person using the Asset Panel to create new assets and another person using the Asset Panel to create new assets but also have the ability to re-value or dispose of them since Asset Revaluation and Asset Disposal are individual functions.