Smart View duplicate aliases Fun!!!!

I’m sure with all new features there will be people on both sides. I don’t know about this one, to me personally duplicate aliases (wow it was released more than a year back) is hit or miss. I’ll tell you why and that is the reason for this blog 🙂

And for those who are having fun (read experiencing horror), this might help you a little bit.

Once in a while (read often) you might get this error message if you are using duplicate aliases in PBCS with Smart View.

“Found duplicate aliases or member name conflicting with alias under parent…… Contact Application Administrator.”

Now I can imagine your face if you are that Application Administrator 😉

What I did is to update Sample Vision app to demonstrate a workaround till we get a fix(?).

Now the good thing is Smart View development team (and don’t quote me or hold me to this) informed me that they could enhance the error message above to include the name of the member which has duplicate issues.

I’m not sure how that will be handled if the sheet has a lot of such members, could it show up as a huge message box, will that be routed to a log. I don’t know (see I told you don’t hold me to it)

Here is Vision application. I changed the alias table name from “English” to “Long,” updated account member aliases as shown below and added an alternate hierarchy called “Summary.”

As you can see from the hierarchy screenshot above, I now have duplicate members under alternate hierarchy “Summary” and if any report that is created from this hierarchy gives you an error message similar to the one above (about duplicate aliases and contact app admin) follow the following steps.

In the same Smart View sheet,

1. Add another sheet and perform an ad-hoc analysis from the cube having issues.
2. Move the dimension with duplicate alias issue to row (it can be anywhere except POV, I prefer rows)
3. Change the alias to the one that you’ve in the sheet with the issue. This is important
4. Navigate to “Member Selection” and select members from the reporting hierarchy, keep the same order

Here is what I got after following the four steps above.

That is the fully qualified name of Current Assets from Summary (when Default alias is selected) 🙂

Keep replacing what you got from this sheet with the ones on the problem sheet. Now if you are using a different alias table, FQN (Fully qualified name will be different)

If you are someone who understands FQN, then you can substitute the member names with the correct ones (again, keep in mind FQNs are alias dependent) and that should solve the issue.

HTH