General Navigation

All Analytic Portal screens share a common navigational approach, although the capabilities are sometimes different from screen to screen.

Leftbar

All available screens for an active report are shown on the leftbar. If a measure has already been selected, clicking on a leftbar link will bring the user to the screen for that selected measure. If no measure has been selected, users will be able to choose the measure of focus before loading the screen.

The leftbar can be hidden for a wider view of the main content panel. When the leftbar is hidden, other non-essential navigational items also disappear, to maximize the view of the main content panel.

Topbar

The topbar contains the link to the My Account screens, by which users can manage their own user profile. The logout button is also in the topbar.

Any user with an avatar picture profiled with their user account will see their avatar on the topbar. Users without profiled avatars will see their initials in the same area. This avatar circle turns into a spinner when the user is waiting for a pending download to complete.

Request History

For users who are granted access to view Ursa Studio-generated SQL, a Request History screen is available in the My Account area of Analytics Portal, which shows recent requests made from Analytics Portal, along with details that might help with troubleshooting.

There are a variety of different request types in Analytics Portal, which are described in the request history with terms like measure-explorer or case-review-count. Within each request type, the method used to serve the request is also noted, which can help shed light on the many layers of caching and optimization that Ursa Studio uses to serve requests to Analytics Portal.

Ursa Studio keeps a cache in the database of responses for requests made by Analytics Portal users. When another user, or the same user in a new browser session, requests the same analysis, the results are served immediately from this cache, instead of requiring the analysis to be re-computed. The results of all the charts in Analytics Portal are saved in this cache, as are the row counts as displayed in the tabs at the top of the case review data table. Requests served by this mechanism will show "cache" as the method.

Long-form measures and interval measures display a view of the data that has been rolled up to the case level; the results reported to the user in Case Review thus are not simply one row per row of the underlying measure table. In order to eliminate the need to calculate this grouping on a per-request basis, every report run creates a companion table to the underlying measure table whose grain size is one row per case, and this table will be used whenever possible so as to minimize processing. Requests served by this table will show "case-grain" as the method.

Measure explorer (as well as similar chart-driven screens such a report home) leverages a dimensional table, also automatically created during the report run, which is a cube across every field designated on the measure as being analytic. This table is often much faster to query and is used whenever possible. Requests served by this mechanism will show "analytic-cube" as the method.

There are circumstances where it would be impossible or unnecessary to use these optimized tables; in these circumstances Ursa Studio automatically routes this query to the raw measure table, and "standard" will be shown as the method.