The fData Designer includes everything required to make and test DSDs.

Options at the top right of the heading bar are available throughout the designer.

Click the icon to open a free text entry box where you can save any text to retrieve later or elsewhere in the designer. Anything entered here is retained between sessions and is available to all designer users.

That's where you are now! Help is in the context of where you are in the designer.

Not shown in the example here as it is a link back to this page.

Opens a separate browser tab and runs the DSD in fTest for you to see the results and performance information. You may be asked for selection criteria.

Testing is only available when the design has been saved and no further changes have been made.

Changes made in the designer are saved in your browser's memory automatically but must be saved to the server to be effective. The Save button changes from green to amber and to red over time since the last save, or as more changes are made without saving.

Click the down arrow to the right of the button for more save options:

• Publish - make the DSD live
• Backup - make a copy of the DSD design that you can rollback to if necessary
• Rollback - roll the design back to a saved backup or previous published version
• Validate - check for errors in your DSD (this is done automatically when you publish)

When you Publish or Backup you will be asked to enter Version Notes. These can be seen in the Design History if you decide to rollback the design.

The home page for the designer is a set of quick links to all sections of the DSD.

The left column of links includes top level options.

• General - edit DSD purposes and whether it is to be gathered asynchronously
• Inputs - click to open a list of all inputs or hold your mouse over to see the list in the second column of this page
• Dependencies - view the inter-relationship between data groups
• Refresh DSD Design - click to update all data schemas

When you roll your mouse over “Inputs” in the left column, each input is shown as a link to its designer page together with a link to create a new input.

A link to the start design page for each data group, together with a link to the “New Data Group” page.

Roll your mouse over a data group link for a complete list of available design pages for the data group.

Roll your mouse over a link in the Data Groups column to see the full list of options. Not all will be live as some will not be relevant to the data group type or status. Here are all of the possible options:

• General - top level options such as Name, a function to prevent execution, and whether the data group has a parent data group
• Data Group Type Settings - setting specific to the type, e.g. Sql query
• Fields - the fields to include in the data (will be all by default)
• Predictions - any Machine Learning models to be applied
• Data Items- 'virtual' fields added to the data gathered (e.g. calculate age from date of birth)
• Sorting - re-order the data gathered
• Dependencies - any manually set dependencies on other data groups
• Access Control - settings for data access control (RBAC or ABAC)
• Link - tie this data group's rows to those of another data group (joining side-by-side)
• Schema - view and edit field attributes (e.g. type or format)
• fDocs Settings - specific settings for fDocs templates
• fPanels Highlights - colour highlight rows and fields in dashboards
• Delete - remove the data group (after confirmation)

Data Group Options are also available from a drop-down menu on every data group page. In addition, if the design is saved the Data Test option is available which runs fTest but for this data group only.