Dexterity Tree View control

Just wrapping up some development of a Dexterity enhancement to GP that uses the TreeView control.  I would like to share some of my findings in this and future posts.

We create data warehouses for clients for Business Intelligence (BI) analysis of financial data.  One aspect of this is the need to summarize data for presentation.  Many times this can be done using existing data attributes, i.e. sales by customer.  But there are other levels of summary that are not available in the data contained in GP.

A simple example of this is a summary of financial data by GL account.  The typical GL contains hundreds, sometimes thousands of accounts.  While GP does contain a table that summarizes that data by period, many times clients want to see that data summarized by the components of the account itself.  Even more common is a summary by what we call the "Natural" or main account number.

An example of that is as follows.

Customer wants to analyze expense data according to the main account in the example below.  The numbers in parenthesis are the starting digits of the accounts in range for the classification shown.

Expenses:

• Selling Expenses
• Salaries & Commissions (61)
• Travel (624)
• Meals and Entertainment (625)
• General and Administrative
• Salaries (71)
• Communications (721)

Let's say it's a perfect world for them and their accounts are arranged in the proper sequence to support this structure.  And let's call this a hierarchy, which is the term we use.

It would be nice if we could set this up once and not have to worry about it again.  But charts of accounts are fluid things and can change, sometimes frequently.

Regrettably there really is no way in GP to represent this type of summary.  This is often times an exercise that is required for financial presentation in FRx or Management Reporter, and those tools have a Tree component in addition to versatile Row format options that allow for this type of thing.

But moving the financial data to a warehouse then out to an analysis tool can present difficulties.  Enter the Tree View control in Dexterity.

I will show how that tool can be utilized to allow the client to maintain a hierarchy for any data in GP so that the above is not only possible, but it's simple to operate.

If you want some advance information about the Tree View control check out the Dexterity Programmer's Guide Vol. 2 as well as the Function Reference.  Both cover substantial detail regarding this useful, but seemingly underused control.