InsightIQ Blog

2.0 Tricks of the Trade in Unica V75 – Copying and Pasting in Unica Campaign

Oct 5 2009

So you are probably feeling pretty good about this topic regarding Unica Campaign V75. Everyone knows how to copy and paste in Unica Campaign, right? Maybe this is a not-so-tricky trick but let's talk about it anyway. Copying and pasting in Unica Campaign is simple enough. You can use the right-hand mouse to copy something that has previously been selected. So let's say for instance that you are working on a flowchart and you want to copy a select process box to another location in that same flowchart. In the flowchart you can highlight the select box by dragging your mouse over the entire process box (it will have a yellow outline when it is selected) and then use the right-hand mouse key to copy the process box. Once you have copied the box you can use the right-hand mouse to paste it. Sound reasonable? But that is not-so-tricky at all. Now comes the trickier part.

What if you want to copy the contents of one flowchart into another? Just as I explained above you can drag your mouse over one or many process boxes, from a single flowchart, and then use the right-hand mouse to "copy" that selection. Everything that is highlighted in yellow will be copied into your buffer (temporary memory on your PC). But how do you get this copied material (in your buffer) pasted into another flowchart?

With Unica Campaign you can have multiple sessions open at the same time. I have had clients ask me "How many times can a single person sign into Unica Campaign simultaneously?". There is no stated limitation from Unica's perspective. A single user could launch a session of Microsoft Explorer on their desktop, type in the URL for the Unica Campaign application, and sign-on to Unica. That same user could launch another session of Explorer and then launch a separate session of Unica Campaign simultaneously by signing-on another time into Unica.

However one does not need to sign into a new session in order to invoke a separate session. And that is the trick we are going to use in order to be able to copy the contents from one flowchart into a separate flowchart. In fact if you sign-on separately into two Unica Campaign sessions simultaneously then this trick won't work. The trick only works if you start from a single signed-on session of Unica and then simultaneously launch another session from within that initial session. Here are the steps you can use to recreate this trick:

1. Sign into Unica Campaign and open up the flowchart in edit mode
2. Select the process boxes that you want to copy in that flowchart (call this flowchart #1). Figure 1 shows what the selection in Unica Campaign looks like:

Figure 1. Selection of Process Boxes in Unica Campaign

3. Click on the "Campaigns" menu from flowchart #1 and invoke a separate session in Unica. You will see the warning in Figure 2. Click on "OK" since this is how you open a Unica Campaign session from within a session.

Figure 2. Warning When Opening Session within a Session in Unica Campaign

4. Create a new flowchart in the newly invoked session of Unica (call this flowchart #2)
5. Use the right-hand mouse key to paste in the contents from flowchart #1 into flowchart #2. Figure 3 shows the pasted process boxes in flowchart #2 that were copied from flowchart #1.

Figure 3. Pasting in Flowchart created from Session within a Session in Unica Campaign

How about that for a not-so-tricky trick? You can respond with your feedback by adding a comment to my blog or by dropping me a line at greg_denlea@csgsystems.com.

Also be sure to check out my previous tricks of the trade blog "How do I dynamically add a date stamp to my list files?".

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