Solving User Security in Exports

Dhawan

 Hi Fellow Anaplaners

 

We had an issue of providing user security while giving capability to user to export the report. Wanted to share, all the challenges we had and how we worked around them.

Problem: 

Users wanted to export a report which had Sales target data of Organisations Sales hierarchy and business units. My report module is dimensioned on Sales hierarchy and business units. Data requested in report was more than 50 line items. Users access is controlled by Hierarchy and business units (to manage data security). If we give native Anaplan export feature then in case a user selects All Pages option for export, then due to such huge volume of data, model performance takes a hit (in case user has access to Worldwide business units). Due to sheer size of the module, putting additional user dimension (to control security) was not an option.

 

Solution

For this, we disabled the native Anaplan export capability from dashboard Menu options on module, to take care of All pages problem. We added a new line item in new module for selecting the business unit with selective access in the List format and used this line item to create a filterd view in the reports module (Filter line item in Reports module with Sales Hierarchy and business unit dimension). Created a saved export with filter on this line item and also pivoted the dimensions to make it better viewing in excel for business users and pubished the export button on the Reports dashboard. In this way, because filter boolean is based on user security dimension even if user selects Show All and select business unit without his access. It will not get exported because of filter boolean and this also resulted in much better report performance even with huge volumes of data,

 

Cheers !

ChrisWeiss

Hi,

Quick question on this. Does this account for users clicking on "Show All" from the Contents panel, navigating to the source module, and creating their own export directly from the module? Thanks!

Dhawan

No the above solution is to take care for "Show All" on list Line items where lists are Selective Access lists and you want users to only access/view list records where they have access.

 

btw, to your diable users not accessing Modules from Contents panel, you can control that by Unchecking "Enable Access to Hidden Content" from Contents-->View.

Then users without Workspace admin wont have the option of Show Hidden Content/Show All on Contents panel. 

ChrisWeiss

Great point, thanks!!