PT 8.62

Randall Groncki

Unless you are creating your dashboards in Production, we need a way to move our Insights objects from the Development environment higher.

Search Definitions, Search Categories, Search Contexts and Search Attributes are all PeopleTools Managed objects. We migrate these to other environments using the PeopleTools App Designer: Add them to your project and copy them to the target.

Insights has its own utility to export and import Insights objects.

Demonstration Example

We are going to use the HCM delivered “Benefits Utilization” dashboards, visualizations and index patterns to demonstrate importing and exporting Insights Objects.

Here’s a quick view of the “Benefits Utilization Tile” dashboard. After exporting it to file, I’ll delete it and then restore it by importing our file back into Insights.

Saved Objects

Insights’ Saved Objects utility is our tool to move our work between environments as well as backup our work.

PeopleSoft Navigation: Home > Reporting Tools > Insights

Navigation in Insights: Home Menu > Dashboards Management > Saved Objects

This page displays every object in that Insights environment. This includes all Index Patterns, Visualizations and Dashboards. Use the Search Box and “Type” dropdown control to find specific objects.

In the search box, type in “Benefits Utilization” and then enter. Our saved objects list now only shows objects with the word “Benefits” or “Utilization” in the name.

Select the “Benefits Utilization” and “Benefits Utilization Tile” dashboards near the top of the list

Click the “Export” button. Ensure the “Include related objects” option is selected.

Click the Export button and save the file to a known location. Update the generic name with something meaningful you can refer to later.

Done

All the objects for these two dashboards have now been saved to your local machine as a “ndjson” file (Newline Delimited Json).

This file can now be imported into other Insights environments moving your Insights objects. This is also a great way to create a “point in time” backup of your ongoing Insights work.

Testing the Export

I’m going to test my export by deleting the “Benefits Utilization Tile” dashboard.

Go to the Insights Dashboards menu and search for “Benefits Utilization”

When we select the “Benefits Utilization Tile” checkbox, the red “Delete” button Appears.

Click Delete and our selected dashboard is deleted after a confirmation check box.

We no longer see it in our Dashboards list

Navigate Back to the Dashboards Management > Saved Objects page.

Click the “Import” button at the top right of the page.

A dialog box appears. At the top is a drop zone where we can drag and drop our saved ndjson export file. Drag your file to here.

Choose the “Check for Existing” objects option. Then choose either to Automatically overwrite existing objects if they have the same name and type or allow you to arbitrate each conflict individually. I’m selecting automatically overwrite conflicts.

Click the “Import Button”

The import is complete.

We can see by the shaded checkbox by the “Benefits Utilization Tile” that this was a new object imported into Insights. The unshaded checkmarks indicate these objects were overwritten by the import file.

Click Done.