How I Built It: Data locking and validation within processes

NoahJ · February 21

Author: Noah Jackson is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Principal Data and Insights Architect at Anaplan.

Hello Anaplan Community! I’m excited to share this ‘How I Built It’ video with you.

In this tutorial, I walk you through two types of actions that you can add to your Anaplan processes to improve your data access control and validation:

A “Lock” action and an “Unlock” action that you can use to easily toggle access between different steps of a process.
A “Data Check” action that we will set up to intentionally fail and halt the process when further action is needed.

In my sample model I use the “Lock / Unlock” actions to allow a non-Admin end user to import into a table for which they should generally have read only access. I use the “Data Check” action to draw attention to when a new product is added and requires a decision point, which avoids having to re-run imports and reduces the risk of missed steps.

I think these concepts and some of the tips and tricks I cover could be useful in all sorts of contexts; leave a comment if you see something that you think might fit in your models!

https://play.vidyard.com/ycCpnCW4aBTGucaYP8oc6V

Happy planning!

ktrankdp · February 23

hi Noah, love the “Lock” action and an “Unlock” action piece, could you give another example on how this could be applied? I feel like i can apply this into our models as we have a situation where we need to lock past versions from end users once the planning cycle is finished. Wondering if this could work, thanks!

NoahJ · February 23

@ktrankdp so Dynamic Cell Access (DCA) could definitely be used to lock past versions! You can learn more about the basics of DCA here: https://help.anaplan.com/dynamic-cell-access-55ae93e6-5139-4bbf-93f9-c8cb06f68f75

For example, you could have a central input module for an input boolean for "Which versions are unlocked" (since a TRUE value is what allows access), and then reference that boolean in the Read Access Driver / Write Access Driver in the module / line items. Setting up DCA locking when you can mark it manually is fairly easy!

The specific method that I described, above and beyond standard DCA input, was about how to do the locking / unlocking within the steps of a process. Normally, whatever the locked/unlocked settings are at the start of the process is what is used during all of the steps of the process.

saglago · February 26

@ktrankdp for native versions you can enable Write, Read or None to control locking or unlocking of past versions to end users via Role - Versions.

NoahJ · February 27

@saglago that is fascinating, I definitely forgot about that specific functionality of Versions!

For reference, here is the mini lesson on that functionality: https://community.anaplan.com/kb/articles/63612-edit-from-edit-to

It is useful for whenever input data has the Versions and Time dimensions - if you need to lock version data that is not on the time dimension, then you would need to use Dynamic Cell Access or some other method.