Introduction

The VantagePoint EMI portal’s navigation is provided by the Content Viewer tree view control. It organizes reports in an hierarchical structure. If, for example you would like to rather use a web page with hyperlinks to give access to groups of reports you can use the method described in this blog post.

Figure 1: Use ContentViewer to navigate the VantagePoint portal

URLs to VantagePoint reports

Either on the VantagePoint server or on a client that has the VantagePoint client tools installed open Excel and go to the Add-Ins tab.

Figure 2: Excel with VantagePoint Add-In

Next select the Insert Function menu from the VantagePoint Add-In

Figure 3: Select Insert Function

The VantagePoint function wizard pops up. From the Options list box choose the “Link to a Report” option and click Next.

Figure 4: Choose Link to a Report

Now pick the Target report. This is the report you try to get the URL for. Click the ellipses button on the right to get to the model browser.

Figure 5: Click on the ellipses button to pick a Target report from the model

In my example I am picking the Extruder Comparison Excel report.

Figure 6: The Extruder Comparison report

Back in the wizard click Next.

Figure 7: Report is selected. Click next!

Specify the report parameters, if required. In my case I go with the default settings and click Finish.

Figure 8: Leave the default report parameter settings and click Finish

The wizard inserted a hyperlink to your Excel report.

Figure 9: Excel report with report link

Select the cell with the newly inserted link and select the Edit Hyperlink command from the right mouse click menu.

Figure 10: Edit Hyperlink right mouse click command

The Edit Hyperlink dialog opens. Copy the URL from the Address field on the very bottom. In my example the URL looks like this:

http://archestra1/VantagePointPortal/GetContentViewer.aspx?fqn=MyEnterprise.Samples.Production.Reports.Extruder%20Comparison&run=true

Figure 11: Copy the URL form the Address field of the Edit Hyperlink dialog

For a test you can paste the URL into Internet Explorer you will get the desired report.

Figure 12: Extruder Comparison Report and its URL

Ausblick

There are a log of manual steps involved to get to the report URL. Since I am trying to learn IronRuby, I am thinking about writing a IronRuby script that would use the VantagePoint API to query the report items from the model and create a webpage that provides a list with all report URLs.

Stay tuned!