Orphan Management

The search panel can be used to place unassigned records (orphans) into a chart. This is useful if your imported data contains no hierarchy information for one or more records.

For example, importing the following data:

ID

ReportsTo 

Name

Title

1

 

Lynn Brewer

CEO

2

1

Larry Stevens

VP Sales

3

1

Claire Chancellor

VP Engineering

4

1

Fred Barnes

VP Marketing

5

1

Gary Truman

Director Operations

6

1

Martin Sawyer

Director Finance

10

14

Mary Wilson

Marketing Director

11

10

Joan Levinson

Marketing Director

Would result in the following chart:

Click to enlarge

With the following unassigned records:

ID

ReportsTo 

Name

Title

10

14

Mary Wilson

Marketing Director

11

10

Joan Levinson

Marketing Director

Even though Joan Levinson has a valid manager (Mary Wilson), Joan cannot be included in the chart because her manager, Mary, cannot be included in the chart. If Mary is assigned to a manager in the chart, Joan can be automatically included in the chart.

To assign Orphans:

1        With the Search panel open, select Orphans w/o Mgr from the Search drop-down list.

2        Click Search. A list of all unassigned records without a valid manager is returned. You can also search for all orphan records (All Orphans) or all orphans with valid managers (Orphans w/ Mgr) by selecting the associated option in the Search drop-down list.

3        Click Search. A list of a search results are returned.

4        Using the  icon you can drag and drop records in your chart using one of the following options:

·         Drag over any box in your chart to move the selected item to a new supervisor.

·         Ctrl-Drag over any box in your chart to create a copy of the selection.

·         Drag into the sub-chart panel to move the selected box to report to the top of the selected sub-chart.

·         Ctrl-Drag into the sub-chart panel to add a subordinate box to the top position of the selected sub-chart.

Note: Click the Sub-chart Panel link to display the sub-chart panel so that you can easily drag records into sub-chart charts.

Click to enlarge

Maintaining Orphan Placement after Data Refresh

You can prevent orphaned records that have been manually added back into the chart from being re-orphaning during the data refresh process. See Data Refresh in  Importing and Exporting Data for details.