Scopes Overview
Scopes vs. Filters
Scopes is an important feature within the Asset Vision platform. As a platform feature it is available to all individual products. Scopes is designed to make ad-hoc reporting a reality inside Asset Vision and at the same time dramatically improve the performance of the product for organizations with very large databases of IT asset information.
Essentially Scopes is a way of applying filters to underlying data such that only the precise results required are visible to the user. How does ‘Scopes’ differ from the existing ‘Filters’?”. Filters have been in the product for some time while Scopes are relatively new. There are three main reasons we added Scopes to Asset Vision. Understanding why we added Scopes will help clarify the differences between Scopes and Filters
- Prior to Scopes, when a Data View or Dashboard page was loaded, the underlying queries, which populated the Data View or Dashboard, would be run against the database immediately; there was no ability to modify the filters to reduce the amount of data returned. With Scopes defined for a Data View, the query is not run until the user explicitly requests, “Run” from the Scopes menu. This opportunity for intervention enables a user to limit the Scope of data returned before the query is run.
- Filters would only operate (apart from in some arcane circumstances) on the items in the Data View. Since some items in Data Views are made up of information aggregated from underlying tables, there was no way to create a filter that could limit the amount of data in the underlying tables that was referenced. In some cases this would mean vast amounts of data was referenced unnecessarily. Scopes can easily be applied to underlying tables, consequently it has a dramatic impact on performance.
- Scopes are much easier for an end use to manipulate, particularly where the number of constraints to be applied is above a handful.
What purpose do Filters serve now Scopes exists?
Once the scope of a Data View has been defined, filters are a very efficient way to quickly remove items from the view, add a quick criteria etc. A filter is the ideal tool to quickly focus in on key information visible in a correctly scoped view.
Scopes View
A data view that has had one or more Scopes applied looks like this to the end-user. The data view will appear in the center as always, however the Scopes column will be displayed to the right. By populating the Scopes fields and pressing Run the user can return data from the data view that meets the Scopes requirements. If the user clicks Run without populating the Scopes fields, all of the data for the data view will be returned.
Scopes can be minimized by clicking the >> button in the top right corner. Doing this won't affect the results of the Scopes filters. Scopes can be minimized to display more of the data view.