Creating and Maintaining Groups

You can define a set of one or more data components (dates, system IDs, workloads, devices) as a group and specify a unique name for the group. The group name then appears as an option at the end of the components list in the Data Selection dialog box. For example, you can define a group consisting of four workloads as WKL_ACT.

To include all four workloads in the same graph, choose WKL_ACT from the workload selection list.

You can use a group in a graph, and then save the graph as part of a project. When you open that project, the graph re presents all members of the group.

You can define a group as part of a template and then open a project using that template. Visualizer lets you change the group before drawing the first graph that uses that group. For descriptions of how to add, change, and delete groups, as well as how to display members of a group, see Visualizer online Help.

Suppose you define a template to draw a set of graphs for an arbitrary date or a specific day of the week. You can define a group for the Date, and save the template. Then, each time you open a project using that template, Visualizer displays the Data Selection dialog box. Select the date (or day) before drawing the graphs from that template. (Variables let you specify first date, second date, next to last date, last date, and so on.) For more information, see Variables for defining dates in templates.

Using wildcards to build selected groups

You can use wildcards to build selected groups in the Data Selection dialog box whenever <ALL> is an option in the drop down list of values. The selected groups are valid only within a session unless you save them to a project or template.

To build the selected group in the Data Selection dialog box, you specify a pattern (<SEL:pattern>). The pattern, which is case sensitive, appears as a unique group in the list. The pattern is any combination of wildcards and variables. Each <SEL:pattern> is added to the drop down list as a unique group. When editing existing selection patterns, close the command with a right angle bracket to prevent the editor from adding a new group with each character you enter.

If there is no match to the pattern, Visualizer displays an error message.

The use of wildcard groups in templates makes scaling your application easy. For example, if you use wildcard variables to specify selected node groups, as you add nodes to your site, they will be included in the groups.

Selected groups are rebuilt every time the <ALL> group is reconstructed. For example, selected groups are rebuilt for groups of objects with dependencies (nodes and transaction groups) and for templates. <ALL> and <SEL:pattern> are also reconstructed for projects, so refreshing a project graph might produce a different graph.

Wildcards to create groups

Wildcard	Example
Question mark ( ? ) - a single instance	<SEL:?BOS> means create a group that includes any object that begins with any character followed by BOS.
Asterisk ( * ) - none, one, or more alphanumeric	<SEL:*BOS> means create a group that includes objects preceded by no alphanumeric, or one or more, followed by BOS.