Expanding entities

When chart entities contain copies of records from the Information Store, you can expand to find related records, and add items that contain copies of those records to the chart.

About this task

Three stages are involved in expanding entities that contain copies of records from the Information Store:
  1. Examine the records that the selected chart items contain.
  2. Find records in the Information Store that are directly connected to them.
  3. Add chart items that contain copies of the directly connected records.

Rather than simply adding all the related information to your chart, you can also expand with conditions, allowing you to decide on the types of records to add. For more information, see Expand with conditions.

Any selected chart items that do not contain records are ignored in expand operations.

If an expand operation finds a record that was already copied to the chart, the application tests whether the record in the Information Store was updated since the copy was made. If a new version is available, the record in the chart item is marked to indicate that changes are available. You can choose to get these changes.
Note:
If a record was deleted from the Information Store since the copy was made, the copy is not deleted from the chart. Instead, the record is marked as orphaned, and its relationship to the Information Store is broken.

Procedure

To expand all selected entities that contain records:
  1. On the chart, select the entities that you want to expand.
  2. Click the Home tab of the ribbon, and then in the Information Store group, click Expand.
    Links and connected entities are added to the chart.

What to do next

You can now use the Analyst's Notebook tools to analyze the items that contain the copied records.