Using a Personal Workspace or Sandboxes

It is helpful to understand how IBM® Cognos® TM1® implements the sandbox concept. This section describes sandboxes and Personal Workspace's in detail.

The sandbox feature lets you create your own personal workspace or sandbox where you can enter and store data value changes separate from base data. A sandbox is not a copy of the base data, but a separate overlay or layer of your own data values that you have entered on top of the base data. This distinction provides a significant performance improvement and is important to understand as you make changes to your data.

Base data is the data that all users can access. Any edits made to base data are written directly back to the database.
Sandbox data is your own personal work area where you can edit the data values as many times as you want and keep the changed data separate from the base data. Sandboxes and Personal Workspace's are private to each user and cannot be seen by other users. Your data values are viewable to others only when you commit them back to the base data. A Personal Workspace is a special, default sandbox that is unnamed and always where you work if that capability is turned on.

Sandboxes are not stored on the client. They consist of a separate and private area of the server. When you work in a sandbox, think of the base model data shining through to the sandbox. When you make a change to data in the sandbox, it is as if the base model data value is temporarily blocked by the value you entered in the sandbox. In order to make the base model take on the values in the sandbox, you must Commit the sandbox. Once the sandbox data values are committed, they are merged with the base so that the changed values then update and become the base values.

Features of Sandboxes and Personal Workspace's include:

Private data changes.
Sandboxes and Personal Workspace's let you try out different changes to the data before making those changes public to other users and before committing those changes to the base data.
Cell Coloring.
Changes to cell values in a sandbox or Personal Workspace are identified by a change in cell content colors. The cells change color to remind you that the change has not yet been merged to the base data. Once data is committed and processing has completed, the cell coloring turns to black again.

Cell coloring is also applied to any dependent cells, such as consolidated or rule calculated cells, that your edits affect. For details, see Understanding cell coloring for changed data values.
Queuing.
Sandbox and Personal Workspace submissions can be processed using Job Queuing so jobs waiting for resources do not hold up jobs that can be processed right away. The Job Queue also allows you to cancel a submission. See Canceling a job in the queue.
Manual Commit.
When working in a sandbox or Personal Workspace, the Commit button becomes available so you can decide when to commit changes to the base. When you commit the data, your changes become available to other users.
Reset Data.
In a sandbox or Personal Workspace, the Reset Data button becomes available and lets you return to the status of your sandbox since the last time it was committed.
Named sandboxes let you create "on-the-fly, what-if Scenarios."
Depending on your configuration settings, you can name multiple sandboxes, such as "Best Case" or "Worst Case" and then compare the impact of your edits by switching between them.

Remember: Your administrator may have disabled sandboxes for your environment or have changed the writeback mode for your usergroup.

To work in a sandbox, you must first open a view and then either create a new sandbox or select an existing sandbox. When working in a sandbox, the selected sandbox applies to all the other views in your current user session.