User Guide: Data Aggregation

Data aggregation is used for summarizing data from an entity onto that entity’s module master page. This is useful for gaining overviews of certain details from entities without having to go to their entity sites. This data can instead be displayed in a column in the business module list.

Here is a visual representation of what data aggregation does:

A case where this feature can be useful is if a project manager wants to be able to see when the latest report on each project was filed from the Projects master site list. Each report could be tagged as such, and this information can be used to aggregate data for when the latest document tagged as report was modified on each project and display this data in a column for each entity in the Projects master site list. This is useful, as it grants an overview of report dates for each project without having to go into each project site and check for report documents and their latest modification date, thereby freeing up time for other tasks. Another example could be aggregation of how many open tasks there are on each entity.

Another case could be using a Union aggregation type to aggregate all participants of various projects of a company to a field on the company, which then can be used to grant these participants rights to see information about the company.

In order to run a data aggregation, access the data aggregation settings page for the business module in question. From there, follow these steps:

1. Click the “Run”-button.

2. Click the “Run aggregation”-button.

The aggregation will now run:

3. The progress of the aggregation can be viewed in the list by clicking “Refresh”.
4. The progress is displayed in the “Details”-column of the list item.
5. During the aggregation a stop-button is displayed in the "Actions" column, which can be prematurely stopped by clicking the “Stop”-button. In this example, the aggregation is complete, thus the button is not showing.

Upon completion, the aggregated data has been fetched and can be displayed in the specified column, granted that the column is set to be displayed in an available view. In this case, the “Last report date”-column from the configuration example was added to a view on the Projects master list called “Compact”, which is shown below:

Data aggregation is performed automatically whenever data changes in a WorkPoint solution. Therefore, scheduling data aggregation jobs is not always necessary. It may, however, be needed if data should be aggregated on a specific schedule regardless of whether data changes.