Displaying comments/notes in a Process Flow

[HeatherS_Highmark]

My customer would like the ability to add comments to an EG Process Flow. He added notes to his flows, but the content of the notes is not automatically open for viewing when the process flow is opened. He doesn't want to have to open each note one at a time. Ideas?

[deleted_user]

I love note blocks in EG projects. It was one of the truly inspired additions to SAS interface. Too often I have seen code that was not commented and I could not reverse engineer. Some plain English discussion of the purpose would help, and sometimes the discussion was too large to fit in a comment block within the program itself. The same goes for notes for interpretation of business data and process rules, where embedding these in the program was impractical.

However, each note has a context, it relates to a particular process or step. Would you want them to all open up when you open the project? That might cram your screen a little. Having project items populate to the desktop when the project is opened might be a possibility you could put to SAS, but I think it might cause more problems than it fixes.

I'm sorry I can't suggest anything else, but personally, when I work on a large project, I prefer to open and close the bits I want as I need them.

[JohnH]

I am torn between the two situations that you both discuss. I also have had times where I need to present the Process Flow to a group of people. In that case, it would be nice to open up some or all of the text boxes. Perhaps, in future realease of Eguide there could be an option that would allow one to open up several of the icon title boxes and the flyover boxes at the same time and they would stay open. Further, perhaps there could be an option to open them all up. But, you are right that they could overwhelm the process flow easily. My solution has been to copy and paste the process flow window into a Powerpoint slide and then copy & paste the open text boxes that I want onto the slide.

[deleted_user]

One of my wishes that I have tried to communicate to SAS more than once is to provide a property attribute to Autorun/open an item in a project when the project is opened.

For example, an Assign Library object that points EGTASK to a directory specific to the project. It would be handy for this just to automatically execute whenever the project is opened. Right now, I have to remember to run all my Assign Libraries manually first, before continuing work, or revisiting work done within a particular project.

[deleted_user]

I find the notes in EG very limited. To understand what I want to see...

If you want to select a few tasks in a flow you can left-click and drag a box....it's that light blue box...and it is fairly transparent...I want something just like that...that is also a text box....This way you could group a few tasks and label the purpose of that section of the flow...this would greatly enhance the ability to create organized and documented flow that can be better understood by yourself and others...

Does anybody agree with me?