Last Updated on October 29, 2023 by maximosecrets

This is the last of three articles on the Graphical Resource View application. I am assuming you have read the first two which you can find here:

Labor        http://maximosecrets.com/2020/10/20/graphical-resource-view-1-labor/

Crews       http://maximosecrets.com/2020/11/19/graphical-resource-view-2-crews/

This article will be a mixed bag including a deeper dive into the toolbar settings and some configuration of the application. We will start with showing some points with regard to Shift Rotations, particularly those that straddle midnight, and which may not be 7 days a week.

Shift Rotations

A shift rotation is where a shift team moves from a Day shift to an Evening shift to a Night shift and then back to a Day shift. If there are three shifts then there is likely to be other teams who are also on rotation, one starting the pattern from the Evening shift and the other starting their pattern from the Night shift.

In the article on Calendars, I built a calendar, 21D-ROT, defined with 21 Days in Pattern and three shifts, SHIFT-A, SHIFT-B, SHIFT-C. You can find the article here: http://maximosecrets.com/2020/10/13/calendars/

In the Graphical Resource View, I have created a Resource List, 21D-ROT which uses the 21D-ROT calendar, and which references all three shifts. The two check boxes are set to show both the Crews that work those shifts and the Labor that are assigned to those crews. Each crew requires three assigned labor one with each of the crafts of DRIVER, ELECT-FIRSTCLASS and ELECT-SECONDCLASS.

Incidentally, there is no field to indicate who owns the Resource List, a pity, I think all of the Graphical Scheduling applications would benefit from an Owner or Owner Group field as seen elsewhere in Maximo. The Resource List may have been created and set-up by an administrator, not the person who most uses the record. I would recommend adding Change By, Change Date to the Resource tab, they already exist in the SKDPROJECT table. But the person who last changed this record, may not be the person who is ultimately responsible for it, although it is more likely to be that person.

When you enter the Graphical View tab you can see the nine Labor records, the three Drivers, and the six Electricians. The labor are grouped according to their Default Craft, and not Craft and Skill Level. You can see two of the crews and the third will probably be found if I scrolled down, a vertical scrollbar is on the right-hand side.

The green cells represent each labor or crew’s work day according to the shift which they are on. Currently we can’t see which shift this is. Later in this article I’ll show you how to add both the Skill Level and Shift columns, and how to filter using these fields.

The calendar has three shifts as follows:

• Night (N) – 23:00 to 07:00 Sunday to Friday (5 days, 8 hours)
• Day (D) – 07:00 to 15:00 Monday to Friday (5 days, 8 hours)
• Evening (E) – 15:00 to 23:00 Monday to Friday (5 days, 8 hours)

Looking at the Graphical View you may be wondering how to interpret these shifts. Let’s start from the 5^th of December 2020 which is a Saturday. If you follow the Driver craft:

• Jenny Pope starts the (N)ight shift at 23:00 on Sunday 6^th December and the last day of her week starts on Thursday 10^th at 23:00 but finishes on Friday 11^th at 07:00. She will move on to the (D)ay shift on Monday 14^th at 07:00.
• Gail Peacemaker is due to start the (D) shift on Monday 7^th at 07:00, finishing her week on Friday 11^th December at 15:00. She will move on to the (E)vening shift on Monday 14^th at 15:00.
• Richard Cutmore is due to start the (E)vening shift on Monday 7^th at 15:00, finishing his week on Friday 11^th December at 23:00. He will move on to the (N)ight shift on Sunday 13^th at 23:00.

The (N)ight shift starts the week on a Sunday at 23:00. The total work hours for the shift are lumped onto the day when the shift starts, therefore the Driver craft shows 8 hours on Sunday 6^th December, when only 1 hour will actually take place on the Sunday, 7 hours occur on the Monday. This is how Maximo works, it doesn’t attempt to make the hours 100% accurate to a 24-hour clock. This is consistent with the Assignment Manager application.

If you cast your eye along to the 25^th December 2020, this is marked as a non-working day in the calendar – a public holiday. For calendars with shift patterns that straddle midnight the non-working day applied to a calendar does not represent a non-working day for the Night shift. See Gail Peacemaker, it is highly unlikely that she and her crew will be going out on 24^th December at 23:00. I think it better not to use Non-Working Days in a Calendar at least where shifts straddle midnight. Better to apply the unavailability to labor and crews individually.

Incidentally Monday 28^th December 2020 is a non-working day in the UK which is why this date was also marked as a non-working day, a white background.

I have deleted the Non-Working Time records from the 21D-ROT calendar. You do this by deleting the records from the Work Periods tab in the Calendar application and not from the action Define/Apply Non-Working Time.

I have replaced the Non-Working days for 25^th and 28^th December with a modified availability record with reason code HOLIDAY. I’ve done this for each Labor and Crew by double-clicking on the cell. If we had a way of being able to filter by Shift then we could have done this much faster by selecting multiple rows and double-clicking one of those rows. You saw that technique being used in the two earlier articles on the Graphical Resource View application.

Incidentally, the Pattern Day attribute is used for defining the letter displayed in a cell, in our case D, E, or N. You can see for SHIFT-A that there are 21 rows, if you page to the next week you would find the Pattern Day as D, and for the last week of records it is E. The SHIFTPATTERNDAY object has the Pattern Day attribute (PATTERNDAYNAME), it is defined as UPPER 3, with an ALN domain SHIFTPATDAY that provides the default value for the Description attribute.

Graphical Resource View – Toolbar

The toolbar has the following elements:

• Quick Filter
• Filter
• Clear Filter and Show All Activities
• Print grid
• Display menu to choose visible columns
• Expand all rows
• Collapse all rows
• Zoom In
• Zoom Out
• Show Legend
• Select Date, and Jump to that Date in the Schedule
• Previous Period
• Next Period
• Reason Code
• Availability Type

The Reason Code and Availability Type were explained in the first two articles on the Graphical Resource View application, and there were also plenty of examples of moving to the next period (month or week) or using the previous period button. The Select Date provides a quicker way of jumping say to the end of the year when you are on the earlier months of it, it uses the regular calendar selector seen elsewhere in Maximo.

The next few sections will look at the other features in the toolbar.

Zoom In – Zoom Out

When you use the Zoom In button the Zoom Out button becomes enabled. You now see one week at a time instead of one month at a time. The 6^th December is a Sunday, is this using the Start Day of a shift, or is that a coincidence?

If you are in Zoom In mode, the Next Period and Previous Period now page one week at a time, instead of one month at a time.

Personally, I don’t think I would be using the Graphical Resource View zoomed in, but then I have a laptop with excellent screen resolution.

Collapse All Rows – Expand All Rows

The Collapse all rows button focuses on the crafts and crew types to provide the total hours available on each day. When all rows have been collapsed you can expand each craft or crew type individually by clicking the plus (+) sign in the description column.

Display menu to choose visible columns

This button opens a dialog allowing you to choose the columns to display. Four of the items are read-only, and the ID field is ticked, but as this controls the display of the column headings and time ribbon it is doubtful you would hide this. The “Hide all” button becomes “Show all” if you uncheck the ID field. The “Show all” button then ticks all of the items and the “Hide all” button removes the tick from all the items that are not marked as read-only. My guess is that the ID field should have been read-only.

Using the Show All button will introduce a horizontal scroll bar in the Resource View pane. You can pull the central bar to the right to reveal the other columns, including the Skill Level and Shift columns. The Filter row is also displayed, this is the row above the craft DRIVER.

With the display now showing the first 12 days of December, the Next Period, Previous Period will still page month by month, and so you would be using the horizontal scroll on the Gantt View pane a lot if you permanently showed a lot of additional columns. I have found that the Resource column is useful to display and you can have one or two other columns which you can use the horizontal scroll to make visible without adjusting the central bar.

The Crew Work Group is only applicable to Crews. The Crew Assignment checkbox is only applicable to Labor that has been assigned to a Crew. If that crew assignment is in the past, it has an End Date, then the labor record will still be checked in the Crew Assignment column. Perhaps this check box ought to show whether the labor has an assignment in the period being displayed. All labor records become checked when you use Next Period and Previous Period buttons, so there is an issue here.

Resource Column Go To Applications

If you had a column permanently displayed, it might be the Resource column as its right-click menu has a Go To action in addition to the same actions found in the Description field. For example:

• DRIVER – Go To Crafts
• GPE – Go To Labor
• BOSOUT – Go To Crew Types
• BOSOUNWA – Go To Crews

Filter and Sort

The Quick Filter is used to search anywhere in the displayed columns. A search by “nicky” and then using the Return key finds Nicky Bangert, note it is case insensitive. A search for labor and crews of SHIFT-A would only work if the Shift column was displayed. A filter of nicky,sam would not find any records because the search is expecting to find “nicky,sam” in one of the displayed columns.

When you use the Filter button a filter row is added, and the Filter button changes to a green button. Each X has a series of options for how to filter in the column.

You can use a semicolon between multiple values to perform a contains search. For example, “nicky; sam” resulted in the two rows for Nicky Bangert and Sam Cooper. The “Contains” symbol is selected when you do this, you do not need to select it first.

Some columns have a drop-down symbol in the filter row. This allows you to use a selection box to filter the rows. For example, selecting Shift-A and Shift-C, would result in a “Contains” and a filter of “shift-a;shift-c”.

The button “Clear Filter and Show All Activities” removes all filters but it does not hide the filter row. The Filter button hides the filter row and the button changes colour back to blue. This button is a toggle for the filter row.

If you click on each column title you toggle between sort ascending and sort descending. If you filter by your first column and then you wish to filter by a second column then hold the Shift key down before sorting on the second column. If you wish to return to the original order, then you can click on the Description column.

Legend and Colours

The toolbar has a Legend button. It opens a dialog showing the reason code values with their associated colours. The Close button does not currently work, but just click anywhere else or click another button, this will close the dialog.

The reason codes are in a synonym domain called RSNCODE. There are two internal values, WORK and NON-WORK. Only the EXTRA TIME and NON-WORK belong to the NON-WORK internal value. These add availability on non-working days or on non-working time, the others create non-availability.

There are two other reason codes, HOLIDAY and LUNCH, both coloured grey, which do not appear in the Legend. I had created both of these in another article.

The colours for the reason codes are held as rows in the System Properties table (MAXPROP). In the System Properties application you should filter by “skd.modavail”. Six records are provided, there is no System Property for the internal values of WORK and NON-WORK.

To illustrate changing the colour for a new reason code I have added a System Property for HOLIDAY, the colour is called Strawberry (!?!) – not the strawberries I like to eat. I have also added a System Property to see if I can change the default one for WORK, the colour is called Asparagus, hmm, similar comment I think to strawberry.

The top 6 colours are aligned with colours found in other Maximo Scheduler applications, so I wouldn’t change those. However, if you have additional reason codes then there are 16,777,216 colour combinations to choose from. The System Property values representing the colours are hexadecimal. The 6 characters after the # are three pairs of hex codes representing Red, Green and Blue.

The resulting Reason Code lookup has the new colours for HOLIDAY and WORK.

The resulting Legend includes HOLIDAY and WORK with their colours, but the Legend includes the original WORK and its colour, the same as used by EXTRA TIME. This makes me think that the WORK and NON-WORK reason codes should be included as System Properties, so that you can change their colour.

The reason code of LUNCH does not appear in the Legend because there is no System Property for it. This was set up as a break type in the article on calendars, so it shouldn’t be displayed in the Graphical Resource View application. A condition on the Synonym Domain value should be able to determine in which application it can be used.

Hover Text and Tool Tip

The new public holidays with reason code HOLIDAY are now much more visible with the new strawberry colour. The 25^th December 2020 for Jenny Pope has hover text of “HOLIDAY / 15:00-23:00”. The hover text template is also a System Property, skd.gantt.MODAVAIL.tip.tpl with the following default value “{reasonCode} / {start}-{finish}”.

By using the Alt or Option key and clicking on a cell, the tool tip will be displayed. This includes the name, available hours, Shift Information, and all modified Availability Information. If there are multiple modified availability records on the same day, then multiple Availability Information sections will be shown.

How long the tool tip stays displayed is controlled by the System Property skd.tooltip.duration. This is 5 secs (5000 milliseconds).

The tool tip is a combination of two records that you can find in the application Configure Tooltips (see https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/6381844/ ):

• Top – laborcrew_load_and_avail_tooltip_template
• Bottom – gww_modavail_tooltip_template

Printing

The Print grid button opens the Print options dialog. You can choose the columns to print, these are synchronised with the columns that are displayed via the button “Display menu to choose visible columns”. I work with A4 Paper Size, but there are options for multiple paper sizes. There is a header and footer, the footer provides the page number, for example 1/1 (one of one) – cropped to save white space in this document.

The partial availability is not always displayed. If you compare the layout above with the layout below you can see a few differences, most notably on 28^th October. There is also no legend, again a pity, as you could almost certainly output all reason codes in a ribbon along the bottom of the page, just above the footer.

If you choose additional columns, Skill Level and Shift in the case above, the width of the Gantt display is squeezed to fit on the same paper size, so I would be careful how many columns are printed. The report is not registered as a BIRT report in Report Administration.

Settings are remembered

The Graphical View is split vertically between the panes for the Resource View and the Gantt View, each has a horizontal scroll bar. In the Resource View I am only displaying the Resource and Description, but I can scroll right to see other visible columns that I may have added using the button “Displays menu to choose visible columns”.

At the start of this article, we could only see two of the crews. At the bottom of the vertical scroll bar, on the right-hand side, there is an arrow which allows you to resize the display of the Gantt View pane. I have moved it down to maximise my screen display.

The settings are remembered when you leave the application and when you return. For example, if you were in Zoom In mode, you would find when you return to the application that you are still in that mode, viewing one week at a time instead of one month at a time. If you had collapsed all rows but expanded the Driver craft, then that will be how you find it when returning to the application and resource list. The month you were currently reviewing will also be saved, so that you will return to that month the next time you launch the Resource List.

These settings are saved with the Resource List; therefore, you may get a different set of columns if you launched a different resource list.