Creating a Custom Subject Area

Space Administrators can create custom subject areas for their space users. As a Space Administrator, you can create your own folders and element groupings and rename element labels to provide more user-friendly browsing in Designer and Visualizer. You also control which user groups can access custom subject areas.

Best Practices:

As a security measure, use custom subject areas to limit access to only specific data.
Access to custom subject areas is assigned at the user or group level. If there will be multiple users of the ODBC client, consider setting up a group for them. To create a group see Creating Groups and Adding Users to Groups.

Tip: You cannot change the name or description of the default subject area, but you can change the user groups that have access to it.

To create a custom subject area

Go to Admin - Manage Access - Custom Subject Areas.

Click New, or drag an element from the Default subject area list to the Work area. The Subject Area Properties dialog opens.

Enter a name and description.

Select the user groups that will have access to this custom subject area.

Click Save.

Drag and drop folders, attributes, and measures from the subject areas to the work area.
Tip: You can drag over a folder, then delete what you do not need.

Optionally, change folder names to what you want users to see. Right-click on the folder in the work area and select Edit Properties. In the Edit Folder Properties dialog enter a new name and provide a description. Descriptions appear as tooltips for the folders.

Optionally, rename attributes and measures to what you want users to see. Right-click on the element in the work area and select Edit Properties. In the Element Properties dialog box, change the tree label, column label (the default name used on reports) and provide a description for the tooltip.

Optionally, you can add folders to reorganize the attributes and measures. To add a folder, right-click on a folder or the root subject area in the work area and select Add Subfolder. In the Add Folder dialog enter a name and description.

10.

When you are finished creating your custom subject area, click Save.

Tips:

To delete a saved custom subject area, right-click on the subject area root folder in the left hand pane and select Delete Subject Area.

Custom subject areas that were imported as part of a package will appear greyed out and italicized on the Custom Subject Areas page and cannot be modified.

Each subject area element has a reference to the base logical name for a measure or attribute in the system's metadata. This cannot be edited. If an object has been removed from the space metadata either due to a base object rename or deletion by the Space Administrator, any subject area elements that depended on the missing column will be removed.