How to create restrictions in Business Insights Explorer views

3 minute read time.

If you want to be able to set restrictions for users/groups on columns or rows in Business Insights Explorer(BIE) views,  you can with Maintain Task Restrictions.   To access, go to System Manager, Maintenance, Maintain Task Restrictions.  You will need to setup the restrictions for each BIE view AND the user or group being restricted. Lets look at a couple of examples of setting up restrictions and look at the BIE view after the restrictions are in place.

 In the first example lets restrict the Vendors BIE view so that it will only show vendors that range from A  to M for a specific user. From System Manager, Maintenance, Maintain Task Restrictions, under the Task Restrictions section, click on the Task lookup. We will first need to find the Vendors BIE view. (show pic 1a) and double click to select it

Next click the User lookup button(or just type in ) and select Admin. In the Column column, select Vendor Name.  For the Operator column select Is between.  In the first Value column select the first Vendor that starts with the letter “A”. Since I am in the SOA company,  I selected ACS.  Then in the second Value column select the last vendor that starts with “L”, in my case LeadEdge. 

In my example the screen looks like the below.  We are saying that for the Vendors BIE view, for the admin user restrict the vendors that are listed to be from ACS to LeadEdge only. Don’t forget to click the Save icon to add this record.

 

Now lets go to the Vendors BIE view and launch it and populate the screen with data. It will look something like this. Notice that if scroll from the top to the bottom in the Vendors area, the Vendor starts with ACS and ends with  Mary Jones and does not show other vendors. Also notice that on the taskbar at the bottom of the Vendors BIE screen, in red there is verbiage that states “Task Restrict Active” This lets the user know that there is a restriction in place but it doesn’t specify what that restriction is.

One thing to note is if, the user goes up to the filter area and creates a filter for Vend Is Equal To(or Contains or Begins with) and clicks the lookup, they will see the entire list of vendors.  But if they select a vendor in the Filter area that is outside the defined restriction, and refresh the screen, no data will show.

  

In our second example lets go back to Maintain Task Restrictions and create different one for the Purchase Order BIE view. In the Task Restrictions section select or enter Purchase Orders in the Task column, Admin in the User column, Transaction Amount Home currency in the Column column , Is greater than in the Operator column and 10,000.00 in the Value column.  The click Save and the screen looks like the below

Go to the Purchase Order BIE view and launch it. Note that if the user happened to be in the BIE view while the restriction was created, they would have to close and open the BIE for the restrictions to take place. The data shown on the screen is now enforced by our restriction. You can see the smallest PO amount is above our minimum and the “Task Restrict Active” is present at the bottom of the screen

I hope you give the Maintain Task Restrictions task a try.  Besides security, it helps reduce traffic of data from SQL Server to the Sage 500 client machine.