Below are the current capabilities, performance considerations, and limitations to keep in mind when working with Change Reports.
Current Capabilities
Some of STEP’s Web UI components allow viewing revisions of attribute values if the component has been configured to show historical revisions and if the user knows that they should click next to an attribute input field to review the revisions. Occasional users, like suppliers, may not remember that access to revision history requires hovering over a blank spot on the screen.
For PLM, most data used for specifications and responses are stored on reference metadata. The Web UI component that is most often used is a multi reference editor, where there is no capability for showing revisions at all.
Performance Considerations
To mitigate the risk of performance issues, it is recommended that snapshot recorders are defined to capture only the content that would change between events. For example, content that is maintained by internal users does not need to be part of a snapshot when suppliers submit their responses since user privileges should prevent suppliers from changing content that is maintained by internal roles.
Limitations
Change Report alerts will only appear on screens that are configured to use the Product Summary Card component.
Views of revisions will be limited to the current data and the last snapshot of the same type (eventId). Specific attributes and references on Web UI screens that have had changes will not show alerts as part of this development as there is a dependency on future development for deep linking.
Content within the Change Report dialog will not consider user privileges to review the data. All data that was captured in the snapshot will be shown if a user has privileges to view the change report. It will be up to each customer to ensure that the data that is defined in a Snapshot Recorder is appropriate for the users that will use the screens.