AmatuerMAX: The Powerful Dot Notation in Maximo

We are familiar with displaying additional information through a relationship in Maximo. If I want to display the asset's serial number in Work Order Tracking application when the asset field is populated, I just have to add a textbox in Application Designer for WOTRACK application and reference the RELATIONSHIPNAME.ATTRIBUTENAME in the attribute property of the textbox. For the WORKORDER object, there exists an OOB relationship "ASSET" to the child table ASSET. So, I need to simply use ASSET.SERIALNUM in the attribute property of the textbox. When an asset is entered in the Work Order record, this textbox will display the serial number.

Maximo relationships are same in terms of SQL joins and we are aware that even multilevel relationships can be used in Maximo. For example, if I have to send a notification to the affected person from a Service Request once it is created. In the communication template for this notification, I can specify a dataset role on SR object, in which value will be :AFFECTEDPERSON.EMAIL.emailaddress. AFFECTEDPERSON is the first level relationship name from parent object TICKET to child object PERSON and EMAIL is the next level relationship name from parent object PERSON to child object EMAIL. This will help is identifying the email address to which notification should be sent.

If we need to set a value in a field from a related field on some condition, we can use the dot notation here too. We have to set the value of the purchase agent of a PO with the value of the ship to person. We can create an action on PO object of type SETVALUE for parameter/attribute PUCHASEAGENT and in the value we can associate the ship to person ID using :SHIPTOPERSON.personid, where SHIPTOPERSON is the relationship name from parent object PO to child object PERSON. We can now reference this action from either a workflow or escalation whichever is applicable.

We can use the dot notation in building conditions also in Conditional expression manager. For example, a condition can be created to check if the bin number in related inventory balances record is same as default bin of inventory record, :invbalances.binnum = :binnum, where INVBALANCES is the relationship from parent object INVENTORY to child object INVBALANCES.

In recent times, we have also seen the extension of this powerful dot notation to result set portlets. I have tried this in Maximo 7.6. I create an object structure "REP_INVENTORY" for reporting purpose as below:

Then I go to Report Administration application and from more actions, I select "Set Report Object Structure Security". Provide access to MAXADMIN security group for the above object structure as below:

Now, in the Inventory application say you have created a query to display the inventory records of the logged in user, "Inventory of User Storeroom". If you want to set up a new result set in some existing start center, when you select to edit the portlet, you will be able to select the application, query and the object structure created above. And, you will be able to see the child table(s) along with the parent table under Object List.

When you select the attributes from the child table, you can see the <RELATIONSHIPNAME>.<ATTRIBUTENAME> in selected fields.

Once you save and finish the result set portlet setup, you will be able to see the resultset as below:

Recently I read an interesting blog about one more power packed feature of using this dot notation. I could not resist myself in trying that out and yes, it is worth mentioning about. You can use this relationshipname.attributename in cross-over domain's source and destination fields. Let us consider an example. We create a custom attribute in TICKET object, which is say, CUSTAPPROVER. In this field in Service Requests application, we need to display the supervisor of the supervisor of the affected person. So, we create a cross over domain as per the image below, which we associate with the CUSTAPPROVER attribute in TICKET object.