Business Areas

Business Areas are created as a list, like all other lists. From an administrator’s perspective, a Business Area is created like any other list. Internally, many actions are taken to prepare ExtraView for the new business process you have just added. In summary, these are –

  • If DISALLOW_AREA_0_DATA and DISALLOW_PROJECT_0_DATA are set to YES, then two projects are created automatically. The first is named by appending Project Defaults to the title of the new business area. The second is named by appending Project Data to the title of the new business area. The Project Defaults is the project with the PROJECT_ID of 0. This is the project from which other projects inherit their characteristics. The Project Data is the project in which the issue data will be stored, assuming you do not create other projects within the business area. You may alter the titles of these projects for your own purposes. It is not normal practice to set these two settings to anything other than a value of YES. These settings are mainly used for backwards compatibility with sites created prior to ExtraView version 5.
  • Security permission keys are created for each user role for the new business area. This allows you to enable or disable the business area for each user role within ExtraView. These security permission keys are named with the following convention when you look at the Grant Security Privileges screen –

    AREA.id (area_title)

    where id is the internal ID of the business area and area_title is the title of the business area.

    The effect of the security permission keys for user roles is to enable / disable the ability for a user within a specific role to be able to view and / or select the business area on all the add, edit and query functions. You can lock any user role out of any business area with this facility.

  • The layout editor will make the new area available to create new layouts. Until you create a new layout within the new area, the layouts from the Global Area will be inherited.
  • The new area will be available within the status rules administration screen, to allow you to set status rules for the new area. Until you create status rules for the new area, the rules will be inherited from the Global Area.
  • You can define multiple roles with access to administration. However, each of these roles can be permitted to see only a specific combination of business areas.

  • Note: Even if a user role does not have permission to see a business area, that role may still be able to retrieve records from that area. For example, a query that asks to retrieve all the “open” issues irrespective of business area will do just that, including records from areas where no permission exists to see the area. You can prevent this behavior by setting a layout cell attribute on query layouts with the FIELD REMOVE NONE attribute. This will force the user to select one or more areas to which they have access as part of their query.


Business Area administration screen

Business Areas and Projects Relationship

Business Areas are linked to Projects, and vice versa. The relationship is that many projects can belong to a single business area.

ExtraView Corporation does not recommend that the global business area (i.e. the business area with the internal ID of 0) is used to store data. It should be used primarily to store metadata about the installation, such as the security permissions to be used as defaults throughout the system, and the layouts that are common across the entire system. Taking this step will simplify the installation of ExtraView when it is to be used for multiple tracking purposes.

The same principle holds true for the global project within each business area, and we recommend that this not be used to store data.

However, this may be cumbersome if you only intend to use ExtraView for a single tracking function and you have the option to alter this behavior. To accommodate the differences, there are two behavior settings in the Workflow Settings menu of Administration.

Setting Name Default Value Purpose
DISALLOW_AREA_0_DATA YES When this setting is NO, issue data may be entered into AREA 0. This is provided for backwards compatibility for installations created prior to version 4.2. Installations created with version 4.2 and greater should not allow issue data to be placed in AREA 0. With installations from 4.2 onwards, this should be set to YES
DISALLOW_PROJECT_0_DATA YES When this setting is NO, issue data may be entered into PROJECT 0. This is provided for backwards compatibility for installations created prior to version 4.2. Installations created with version 4.2 and greater should not allow issue data to be placed in PROJECT 0. With installations from 4.2 onwards, this should be set to YES

The default business area and project lists in the list modification screens do not include entries for the global area (0), if DISALLOW_AREA_0_DATA is YES or project (0), if DISALLOW_PROJECT_0_DATA is YES.

In addition, when adding or editing an area, a warning is issued if DISALLOW_PROJECT_0_DATA is YES and the area added or modified has no projects beyond the global project.