Working with categories

Categories are classifications you build to organize and structure notifications, InfoSets, and other content. If you are familiar with OLAP databases, you can think of categories as dimensions.

When Smart Notification is installed, the Install Validator imports DefaultCategories.xml, which builds the default category outline. After building InfoSets and notifications, you can add and group your content into categories. Other users can then easily access and cross-reference content from their notifications.

For example, you can add a dimension called Year and then children called 2020, 2021, and 2022. Then you can add children to 2020 called Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4. When you build InfoSets or notifications pertaining to your company's financials, you add those items to the proper year and quarter.

You can also use Categories to help users search for relevant information. For example, if you receive a notification about sales revenue, you can also search for information pertaining to new sales revenue for Q1. The search results contains any Smart Notification item that is exactly categorized as new sales revenue for Q1. However, the search also returns items that are categorized as any other revenue for Q1 because those items are also relevant to your search.

Smart Notification allows you to build categories based on existing outline formats. You can use the Work With Categories tool to import existing XML documents or Hyperion Essbase structure files (.str) that you exported from Hyperion Essbase outlines.