Extending Celonis perspectives
You can extend the perspectives from the Celonis catalog with further objects, events, relationships, and event logs. We'll save your extension separately from the Celonis perspective, so you can view and use the original perspective with or without the extension, and you can create more than one custom extension for the same Celonis perspective.
Your extension can use custom or Celonis catalog objects, events, and relationships.
You can connect object types in your extension to the object types in the Celonis perspective by including or embedding them. Embedding (where you use a copy of the object type) is safer as there's no risk of creating a cycle in the Celonis perspective. See Relationships and cycles for more information on choosing relationship strategies and avoiding cycles.
The object types in your extension don’t have to be directly connected to the object types in the Celonis perspective, or connected to them at all. You can include distinct groups of objects that are connected to each other but not to other groups, and standalone helper objects that provide reference information.
You can add custom event logs that use object types in your extension as the lead object type. You can also change the default event log for the perspective to be one of these.
Tip
If you've already created a custom perspective to use instead of a Celonis perspective, consider adding your customizations as an extension to the Celonis perspective instead. Celonis perspectives get updated with the latest changes and fixes when you update your Celonis catalog version, so they'll continue to meet the requirements for the Celonis apps and features that use them.
When you publish your extension to a perspective, we create another data model for it in the OCPM Data Pool, reproducing the data model for the perspective and adding tables for the object types, event types, and relationships in your extension. You can manage, load, and use this data model separately from the one for the unextended perspective.
Follow these steps to extend Celonis perspectives. If you have any problems, check the solutions in Troubleshooting perspectives.
From the Celonis navigation bar, select Data > Objects and Events.
Select Perspectives in the top navigation bar to browse the existing perspectives for your Celonis team. Click any perspective to view it.
Click the Extend button for the perspective you want to extend, or go to the context menu (the three vertical dots) for the perspective and select Extend.
Type a name for the extension, and click Next.
Search, browse the list, or look in the graph view for an object type that’s already in the perspective, that you want to connect with an extension object type. Select the existing object type to see its details pane.
Select Linked objects in the sidebar if you want to include the extension object type in the perspective as a regular object type, or Embedded objects if you want to embed a copy of the extension object type. Relationships and cycles explains when embedding is appropriate and how it avoids cycles in the perspective.
Click Add and start typing the name of the object type you want to use in the extension, then click to select it.
Select the radio button for the relationship between the two object types that’s relevant for this perspective. The object type is now included or embedded in the perspective extension.
Search for any more object types that you want to add in the extension, and add those in the same way.
Set up any custom event logs that you want to create. Celonis automatically generates an event log for each object type in your perspective, but you can set up others if you want to include further events that are indirectly connected to the lead object, through another path of object to object relationships. For each event log that you want to set up:
Select Event logs.
Click Add event log.
Name the event log. You can’t use spaces and special characters.
Select the lead object type that the events happen to. This object is the Case Key.
In the list of events, check the box to select each of the events that are relevant for the process you are tracing.
If you want to analyze subsets of an event type:
Click the arrow by the name of an event type to expand the list of attributes.
Check the box for the attributes where you want to drill down. You can select any number of attributes for any number of events in the event log.
Tip
Selecting numerical attributes can produce a lot of different subsets - these are handled as separate events and may break certain limits, so be careful when selecting attributes with these data types.
Drag and drop the attributes to arrange them in the order you want. We'll query the attributes in the order you place the events in the event log, followed by the order you place the attributes in the event type definition. If you need to change the ordering for different use cases, you can do that in the PQL query in Knowledge Models that use the event log.
Check the box for Set as default event log if this is the default case for the perspective.
Click Save event log.
You can edit or delete an event log from the context menu (the three vertical dots) next to the event log’s name.
Tip
You must mark one of your event logs as the default event log to use this perspective with Analysis, or with another application or feature that expects a single event log rather than multiple event logs. If there isn't a default event log, some PQL operators (for example ACTIVITY_TABLE and CASE_TABLE) won’t work.
If the application or feature uses a Knowledge Model, you can mark a custom or automatically generated event log as the default event log in the Knowledge Model.
If it's an older application or feature that doesn't use a Knowledge Model, you need to mark the default event log in the perspective editor. You can't mark an automatically generated event log here, so if you don't have a suitable custom event log, set one up and mark it as the default.
Click Save to save the extension. You can find it again in the perspectives editor navigation by clicking the arrow by the perspective that you extended - it’ll be marked with a tag to show that there are extensions.
To create more extensions based on this one, click the context menu (the three vertical dots) next to the extension’s name in the perspectives editor navigation, and select Duplicate. You can also delete an extension from its context menu.
Select Publish > Publish to development to synchronize your changes to the development environment, then Publish > Publish to production if you’re ready to use the extended perspective in production.
Follow the steps in Loading and using perspectives to load the data model for the perspective, and use it with a Celonis feature. Apps that use the supplied perspectives won’t make use of your extension unless you select the extended perspective for the app to use, and edit the app package in Studio to reflect the extensions.