Selection capabilities in PAW Modeller

I am finding the object tree in PAW Modeler difficult to use. It seems to have re-implemented some of the issues in Perspectives.

What I would suggest is that instead of one continuous tree showing all types of objects, cubes, dimensions, etc, that we instead have selections at the top to select one type of object, so that the lower pane only shows objects of the selected type, eg cubes, or dimensions, not both. A developer is in general only wanting to find one type of object at a time.

The selection area at the top should include the search box. This needs to be static in the top pane. At present it scrolls with the list of the cubes and soon scrolls off the screen. If you cannot find the search box then you cannot use it to search!

The ability in Perspectives to type the first character to jump to eg the cube that starts with that character has been lost but if the search functionality mentioned above was implemented this would not be necessary as this would give a better way to search than Perspectives.

There should be a sub-search, eg if expanding a cube to show views then the sub search would search the views. If expanding a Dimension then the sub search would be for Subsets. An alternative would be the sub types opening in a different column to the parent object, eg Cubes in the left column, and if they pick a cube and expand views, the views show in the right column with a search option above that. I think most cubes and dimensions that have been around a while tend to have a lot of different views and subsets so some way to search these is needed.

The fact that the list only shows a small number of items and then only shows further items when you scroll down is problematic. If the list was constrained to only show one type of object, it should be possible to show all objects without stretching client memory limitations too much.

The icon for rules is difficult to distinguish from that for a cube and should be changed, eg re-introduce more colour.

Double clicking a cube should show the default view.

The fixed top pane should show the selectors for the main TM1 objects, eg icons for cube, dim, process, and chore. It should also show the search text boxes for major and dependent objects (views and subsets). There should also be a + to open a window to create a new cube, dimension, etc.

Following on from another suggestion the full implementation of application folders as per Perspectives would enable developers to organise cubes, processes, etc, into a logical folder structure of related items. Happy to show IBM our folder structure to illustrate how we use this.