Adventures in Groovy – Part 4: Run Time Prompts

Introduction

Groovy provides a very easy way to interact with the user via run time prompts, or RTPs.  These can be linked to dimensions, members, and input.  One of the huge benefits of getting RTPs in Groovy is that the result can be validated, and the calculation can be cancelled if they don’t validate (we will touch on this in a future post).

The Solution

This is one of the easier things to do with a Groovy calculation.  There are two things required.  First, the Groovy calculation must prompt the user to select a value.  This is done by doing the following.

/*RTPS: {RTP_Consolidate_Data}*/

At any point in the script after the above, the value can be used.  If it is going to be used multiple times, it might be easier to set a variable.  Regardless of the approach, the value can be referenced using the rtps object as follows.

 String sRTP
 sRTP = rtps.RTP_Consolidate_Data.toString()

That is all that is required!

Conclusion

Beyond the obvious uses of an RTP, I have started using these for a number of other reasons.

• On global forms where multiple values may be changed throughout a short period of time and execute long running calculations, like allocations, I have seen benefits of prompting a user with a yes/no smartlist RTP.  If the user has more changes, they may not need to execute the calculation after every save.  This gives them the option.
• If there is a requirement where some prompts are dependent on other prompts, using RTPs in Groovy gives you the flexibility to validate the combination.  For example, if an employee is set to hourly with a VP title, the prompts can be validated and returned to the user as invalid combinations before the prompts are removed from user view.