6. Comment Visual
The Aimplan Comment visual enables users to add comments within their Power BI reports, without it being connected to specific inputs in an Aimplan Planning and Reporting Visual.
The comment visual is just as the status visual often connected to a specific subprocess, such as OPEX in the Training use case. Like the status visual, you need a specific storage table to store the inputs from your comment visual. This is already set up in the Training, and we use the same sets of keys as in the status table; SubProcessKey, ScenarioKey, and CostCenterKey.
To start working with the Comment Visual, you first need to add the Aimplan Comment Visual to your report from AppSource.
Next, add the visual to the page you are working on, 5. Status and Visual.
Start by adding the fields SubProcessKey, ScenarioKey, and CostCenterKey from their respective dimension tables into Key Fields as these are the keys that are included in the comment fact table (see markings in picture below). These fields are chosen due to the- following reasons:
- SubProcessKey - defines what process the comment should be related to, in this case OPEX
- ScenarioKey - always necessary in Aimplan visuals in order to separate different scenarios from each other
- CostCenterKey - is the active slicer on the page, therefore the end user will comment on the CostCenters they are currently looking at.
Next, add String Value from FactCommentTable to Text Measure.
For the visual to know where to write to, you need to enter Edit Mode by clicking on the three dots in the upper right corner and choosing Edit. Here, you need to choose which instance to write to and which target table the entries should be saved in. Coose Aimplan Training and FactCommentTable.
Apart from the key fields and the text measure on which you save your written inputs, we want to add a Display Field that lets us choose which cost center we want our comment to apply to in case we are looking at multiple cost centers at the same time. We do this by dragging CostCenter from DimCostCenter into Display Fields.
As you have no data in your FactCommentTable to begin with, you need to right click on both your key fields and your display fields and enable Show items with no data.
You should now be able to write comments and save them, meaning you have created a page where the end user can input planned values, which status their cost center is currently in and enter a general comment for each cost centers report.
