Use text mode to create a detailed user view

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Use Text Mode to Create a Detailed User View

Have you ever needed to see the other groups, teams, or job roles that all users in your environment are assigned to? Rather than manually clicking into each person’s profile, create a detailed user view that pulls this information into a single view. 

NOTE: This blog is part of the “Basic Text Mode” series. It is not intended to teach you about text mode reporting beyond what you need to know to produce this view. Links are provided at the end of the article if you’re interested in learning more about text mode.

As a system or group administrator, you might look at the list of all users, found under the People tab, and ask yourself, what job roles are assigned to each of these users? You can’t see this in a standard user view, so you would need to edit each user’s personal information to find out. By using text mode, you can see all job roles, teams, groups, and direct reports in columns in your view or list report.

In this blog, you will learn how to create four columns within a user view. 

• All Job Roles
• All Teams
• All Groups
• All Direct Reports

Your final view will look like this:

NOTE: The column for Primary Role shows which job role is the main, or primary assigned, role to this user. Similarly, you can designate the Home Team and the Home Group. 

To get started, select People from the global navigation and click the People subtab. In the View menu, scroll to the bottom and select + New View.

1. Name your view, then delete all columns except for Name. Your screen should look like this:
2. Click Add Column. In the upper-left under “Show in this column,” type “job role name.” You’ll see this
3. Click on Name (under Job Role) and it adds the column, as shown below.
4. The Job Role field is where the user’s primary job role is stored. To change the column name from Job Role: Name to Primary Role, click Advanced Options in the upper-right. A screen appears where you can type in a custom column label:
5. Type in Primary Role in the Custom Column Label field, Select Done.
6. Now let’s add the Other Roles column. Click Add Column again. Click Switch to Text Mode in the upper-right.
7. Hover your mouse over the large text box until you see the words “Click to edit text”. Click.
8. Copy the text mode code below and paste it into the text mode window, replacing anything that was previously there

       listdelimiter=

       valuefield=role:name

       listmethod=nested(userRoles).lists

       valueformat=HTML

       displayname=All Job Roles

       textmode=true

      type=iterate

Your screen should look like this:

9. Click Save.

10. Add the “home team name” column to your view. Use the Advanced Options to change the column label to Home Team by following the same steps for Primary Role. 

11.Now let’s add the All Teams column. Add another column, switch to text mode, and paste in the following:

       listdelimiter=

       valueexpression={name}

       listmethod=nested(teams).lists

       valueformat=HTML

       displayname=All Teams

      textmode=true       type=iterate

12.Add the “home group name” column and change the column label to Home Group using the Advanced Options feature. 

13.Add another column so you can create the All Groups column. Copy and paste the following into the text mode window:

      listdelimiter=

      valuefield=group:name

       listmethod=nested(userGroups).lists

       valueformat=HTML

       displayname=All Groups

       textmode=true

       type=iterate

14.Add one last column—Direct Reports. Copy and paste the following:

            listdelimiter=

            valueexpression={name}

            listmethod=nested(directReports).lists

            valueformat=HTML

            displayname=Direct Reports

            textmode=true

            type=iterate

There you have it!

The text mode lists that were used to view all job roles, teams, etc. are called collections. You can use this same approach to access collections attached to other objects, like tasks and projects. To learn how, go to Referencing Collections in a Report, located on the Workfront Experience website. 

If you have already taken the Report Creation courses in Ascent and want to learn more about text mode, register here for Advanced Reporting, Part 1, the live, instructor-led webinar set for Tuesday, October 8 at 8 am (MST). Pro Tip: Live classes offer topic-based Q&A time.

For additional information or further text mode instruction, check out the article Understanding Common Uses of Text Mode, located on the Workfront Experience site. 

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future Did You Know columns, please share those details in the comments section below. Please “like” this post, if you found it helpful!