In our second tip blog, Tip #2: General Navigation, Ebbe gave some useful tips on general navigation within the SimCorp Dimension screens. In this piece, we will follow up on this and look at how to more specifically find the screen that you need to visit.
As you will know SimCorp Dimension consists of many screens and some of them you may not visit regularly, so remembering their exact title can be a challenge. If you have used a screen in the past, one way to find it again of course would be through the list of last visited screens. This list is however limited and in most cases as default only shows the 5 latest screens. You can extend this to 12 in the portal settings (Click the gear wheel and Portal settings).
Given the number of screens, 12 is however not a long history, so the chance is that what you a looking for is not in the “history” list anymore. Luckily the SimCorp Dimension portal offers search functionality and you will probably already use this both to search for screens but also just as a way to open a screen you know the name of by heart. But did you know that the search function has some hidden tricks and extended functions?
Using the default settings, the search function looks for exact text matches so if you for instance are searching for the screen called “Compare Risk Factor Manager Values”, any part of this text will give you a list of results including this screen – but also any other screen that matches the text, for instance searching for “Manager” or “Risk Factor” will return a large list of hits. If you remember that the screen caption contains “Risk Factor” and “Values” and hence search for “Risk Factor Values” you will not find this screen as it's searching for an exact match.
Here a wildcard is useful but unlike in most parts of the system the wildcard in the portal search is not “%” as you might think but instead * - so in our example searching for “Risk Factor*Values” will work and so would “risk*fac*val”.
However, the wildcard does not help if you are not sure about the wording and spelling of the title. Also, the list of results is not sorted in a meaningful way. The portal however offers the option to change the search mode from “Exact match” to “Closest text”. You can change the default behavior in the “Portal settings” to “Search text match scheme”
After changing the search mode, you can find the screen “Compare Risk Factor Manager Values” by searching for any word in the title, regardless of the order and even if you misspell or mistype.
For example: “Compare factor risk” gives the following results:
- Compare risk factor scenario
- Compare risk factor manager values
Even after misspelling or making typing mistakes in whole words such as “Risk Faktr scen” you will get results and in most cases be able to find the screen you are looking for.
By the way, from the search results, you can open the desired screen, using the keyboard simply by hitting the tab key and then using the arrow keys to navigate the “yellow frame” to the link.
Try it out! I hope that this tip can save you a little time in your everyday work with SCD. We look forward to hearing any comments or feedback you may have on this topic.