12 Days of InFlow - Group Projects Together in DriveWorks

It’s the final day of the 12 Days of InFlow. I wanted to start off by saying Happy Holidays from the entire InFlow team. We hope you have had the chance the unwind and unplug and spend some quality time with those you care about. We’ve been busy all season and things are far from done for the year. But one group that is done for the year are Santa and his elves. Today, we’ll look at our final installment of how the elves used DriveWorks this year. This time, how did they use child specifications to group projects together and stay organized during the holiday season?

Child Specification Lists

Child specification lists are an amazingly useful tool that can keep specifications organized and maintain a hierarchy within the projects. Using Child Specification lists, you can make things like dashboards to keep all of your projects straight. Let’s take a look at the dashboard used by the elves this holiday season.

I worked with Jingle a lot during this whole process. He wanted to be able to track everything a child wants for Christmas and have it all stored in a single location. Then, he knows what toys he’s configured for the children and doesn’t accidentally double-up. So how does a Child Specification List work? How can we actually use it to group our projects together?

Adding a List

When you add the list, you need to add the list of projects to the control. In our example that we worked through with Jingle, we were creating 1 of 4 new toys for Charlie Child.

Notice that there is a section for constants. Constants from each project can be added and their values written from parent projects. Specification properties can also be written as well if we want to track them. Even when grouping our projects together, we can track individual pieces of information that are important for our records.

When we run the Child Specification List and add projects, they run just as if you were running them in a standalone sense. Every transition, macro, text box, and table are available for use. This is especially useful when you need to send each product through an approval state. Charlie wanted all of the available options, and since he was very nice this year, Jingle and Santa are rewarding him.

We can see that every project is going to the proper state and is kept organized. Essentially, we ran 4 projects in one parent project, grouping projects together and keeping everything in order and easy to track. Now Jingle and Santa can relax because the hard work is done for the year. Child Specifications made their lives easier this holiday season, how will it make your life easier and projects better?

~Nick