Second post of the day. (Well, some things can’t wait and some can)
I’m on a race with Cameron Lackpour on this and I believe that he is going to beat me.
You might be thinking what Focused Aggregation is (I really like that term), I stole it from Cameron’s blog :). Even the idea shared here is not mine.
What is it says is – Aggregate only where data is changed
You might have used this technique, however might not have heard the term and vice versa, if so have a look at these wonderful blog posts from Cameron.
On a side note, I think that was the first and second time my name was referred by him (someone like him) on his “Love-Hate” series on Calc Manager rules.
After reading his posts you might be thinking “Isn’t that same to <Calculate Form> business rule on WebForm?”.
There was a not so old thread on Network54 and Christian M updated the post Network54 with his question.
What he updated (I’m happy that he came across an issue and thought of updating the post), just blew our minds. It is awesome, super cool hack.
Christian figured out a way to pass Planning User Variable argument to Calc Manager rule (also to HBR, you can look at the discussion for more details)
How is it done
1. Create a User variable in Planning and use that in Rows.
I found an issue with spaces and variables, Planning adds the variable within quotes and this will cause an error when you open the form.
You’ll have to manually remove the “s so that it looks like IDescendants(&My Segment)
Back to what we were discussing,(For record, I’m using a User Variable called My_Entity)
2. Create a Variable in Calc Manager
Assign the Default Value as &My_Entity.
3. Create a rule which refers this Variable
Script View of Calc Manager shows that it is picking up the default value.
3a. Hide the prompt
I wrote about this earlier in a post, however just thought of repeating it.
When you use hide prompts on WebForm Planning is hiding all the prompts coming from Page/POV (because it knows which one to pick from).
What happens when the prompt member (dimension) is from Column/Row, yes it’ll show the prompt window and then will ask you to select a member. However you can hide it by supplying a default value and make it hidden in Calc Manager rule.
4. Deploy the rule
Word of advice – don’t use Validate and Deploy for this rule, Go to “Actions” –> “Deploy”
Okay what happens if you perform “Validate and Deploy”
It’ll not deploy and it proves that I don’t have a Substitution Variable 😉
Enter Values in WebForm, run the rule and there you go focused aggregation on row/column members.
I looked at the logs and yes it is passing the User Variable value to Essbase.
Isn’t that cool 🙂
Update
10/14/2103I looked at <Calculate Form> and it is handling aggregation in a different way. It is focused on all Parents on the form (Rows) and then calculates it. I’ll try to post more on that in a different post. It looks like I beat Cameron 🙂 (I’m sure that his post will be brilliant)
10/15/2013
Check Cameron’s post on the same http://camerons-blog-for-essbase-hackers.blogspot.com/2013/10/row-driven-focused-aggregations-in.html
This is great Celvin. This is more than moving toy car and guy from the corner.
Thanks @anon, but all credit goes to Christian (so still the guy from corner 😉 )
This is awesome Celvin! Thanks a lot for sharing this.
Cheers.!!
Rahul S.
Fantastic Idea Celvin