How Arc Can Supercharge Your Productivity

Arc is a piece of software designed to help IBM Planning Analytics (TM1) developers to increase their productivity without compromising the quality of their work. Since its launch in March 2018, over 500 developers have chosen Arc as their development tool of choice and they continue to benefit from the immense value that it provides.

The traditional tools that came before like Architect or Perspectives are now over 20 years old and while they still serve a purpose, they aren’t on the cutting-edge of what modern development requires. Features such as debugging and impersonation alone make Arc a far superior tool that you can leverage in your quest to supercharge your development productivity.

All of this comes at a very affordable cost – so it really is a no-brainer decision. For just $50 per month or $500 per year, you can save days of crucial development time – creating much more value than what you might spend on the product itself.

To illustrate this, let’s look at some of the ways that Arc helps to improve your productivity by finishing tasks faster and more efficiently.

A Single Platform for All Your Development Needs

When you use Arc, you don’t have to switch between different admin hosts to find the specific TM1 instance that you need. Arc connects to all your instances (on IBM Cloud, other cloud platforms, and on-premise) and ensures that each one is at your fingertips at all times. The powerful TM1 REST API means that it doesn’t matter where they are hosted, creating efficiencies at every step of your development process.

To make it even easier to work with many different instances, Arc introduced server groups that allow you to groups instances or servers into appropriate categories and then toggle between them effortlessly.

Access Your TM1 Objects Quicker

Arc’s search functionality is powerful and convenient – allowing you to quickly find a specific process across any of your instances so you can get straight to work. You can access all your objects by filtering the type (t:type) and instance (i:instance) accordingly.

Duplicate Code Faster and More Efficiently

Whenever you want to leverage code that has already been written, Arc makes that easier than ever. You can duplicate code through features such as code completion, snippets, syntactical formatting, and so much more.

Stop wasting time rewriting code and leverage your existing base to its full potential.

Start a New Process from a Template

Instead of starting from scratch every time you need a new process, Arc has a sophisticated process editor that can help you create templates that automate the common features. This helps to improve the speed of your development, while also creating better consistency across your team.

Once a template has been created, you’ll be able to select it when you create a new process. It will automatically contain all the information that was used to create the template in the first place.

Code Faster with Shortcuts

You’ll find that your development can get a lot faster if you utilize some of the keyboard shortcuts that Arc offers. Here are some popular ones that can make all the difference:

Ctrl + F: Find.
Ctrl + H: Replace in all tabs.
Ctrl + /: Toggle comment.
Ctrl + Shift + F: Fold region.
Ctrl + Shift + E: Execute Process.

Here’s an example of using Ctrl + H to replace a string across all tabs:

Create Time Dimensions

Creating time dimensions can be quite time-consuming if you have to populate many different attributes such as next, previous day, week, and so on with different formats. Arc sidesteps this and includes a very flexible time management plugin that allows you to quickly and easily create new time dimensions or add new elements to an existing dimension.

Save Time by Testing Your Security with Impersonation

Arc is the only software out there that allows TM1 developers to create a session that impersonates another user. Impersonation is an extremely powerful feature because it gives TM1 admins the ability to log in as any user with their own credentials. Here are just two of the ways that this can be useful:

If a user needs help with a private object (views, subsets, applications, etc.) then the administrator can cut straight to the point and log in as the user so that they can fix the issue as quickly as possible.
If there is some troubleshooting that needs to be done, the TM1 admin can see exactly which cubes, dimensions, and elements the user can see.