Is Cognos TM1 getting better?

[George Regateiro]

For me the TI language itself is pretty good at what it does and I very rarely come across something that is just plan impossible.

Nothing is impossible but things like

- New data types (arrays, lists) would be very handy
- Functions with actual configurable return values, to me process execute and global variables are not a good solution
- Maybe a class structure that would make something like bedrock a library that could be included and not a collection of processes
- Multi Threading - We have a lot of processing that something like multi threading a process without having to call it through batch processes and losing visibility would be great

Those are just some of my wish list offhand. As someone that came from a C# background TI is very limiting. Not impossible just limiting. Java TI is nice in some respects but it is still a bolt on.

[ardi]

I have been working with 10.2, 10.2.2 and all possible hotfixes, and the TM1Web part, is too bad. It has many bugs, and by bugs I mean dangerous bugs. The back end is better, and MTQ is a good feature but the behavior of TM1Web is really painful, so I would say its not a finished product.

We have reported 2 major bugs, one is related to Collapse/Expand nodes in an active form, I have posted a thread here regarding this, and the other one is UNDO/REDO buttons, and I have also posted a thread for this one too.

Both have been accepted from IBM as defects and they will be fixing them soon I hope

Other issues I would mention are, SCROLLING in websheets with active forms with more than 100 rows, it is painful

If you have more than one TM1Instance running on the same box, and if the user connected to only one of them ( but has access to both ), then in our websheet we had a formula to detect which Instance is the user connected to by using the TM1User(TM1InstanceName), so normally it should return the user name only if the user is connected to that instance, but guess what, it returns the user name for all the Instances.

Active Buttons get misaligned in TM1Web

If you freeze panes in a websheet, you get all kinds of issues

Cell Protection does not work properly, eventhough after we applied a hotfix, it's better but still we find issues rel;ated to that
Action Buttons. We have lots of action buttons that RUN TIs and then we have created a small cube, one of dimensions being }Clients dim. So in our TIs we write a message to that cube and then in Websheet we have a DBR formula let's say in cell A1 to retrieve that message and then in the properties of Action button, instead of hardcoded message we use that cell reference. This worked fine until we applied a hot fix, and then the action button was not displaying the updated message. So instead of doing that, in all our 50+ websheets we had to write the DBR() formula directly in the properties of Active Buttons

There are many other issues, so my vote is "NO"

[blackhawk]

Blackhawk wrote
What functionality do you think is missing that prevents or makes it hard to deliver end-user requirements?

Well, that would be a rather large discussion, but I would say a few that come to mind are:

• function/subroutines
• arrays
• time functions
• debugging
• standard language constructs (for/next/continue/break and case/break/default)
• create view by MDX
• notifications
• triggers
• Oh, and how about the ability to write out any kind of text file, not some forced CMA(?? ) that can't even append to the existing file between tabs.

... and on...and on...

Not to mention just general cleanup of the language itself. LONG??? TABSIZ??? @ (for strings)??? DIMNM???

This is not the 80s anymore...I think we can make some advancements here.

Don't get me wrong...I LOVE TM1 (my career revolves around it), but the engine just has not evolved like it should have. Too much focus on the myriad of UIs and lots of opportunity left behind on the engine. Arguably, the engine is what people love the most of TM1 and what distinguishes it from every other database technology out there.

[jim wood]

the engine just has not evolved like it should have. Too much focus on the myriad of UIs and lots of opportunity left behind on the engine. Arguably, the engine is what people love the most of TM1 and what distinguishes it from every other database technology out there.

There in a nutshell you have the reason why I didn't vote yes, and will continue to not vote yes unless they sort it out. I think we need John Oliver on the case.......

[Alan Kirk]

All that said, these newer GUIs (including Tomcat-based Web for that matter) are relatively new, and it would be more likely than unlikely to see bugs in them once they're deployed in the wider world. The same will undoubtedly be true of any newish software on the market.

To be fair, I'll say one thing for the 10.2 Tomcat-based Web after running that and 9.5.2 side by side on different machines with the same database this morning.... at least it finally, FINALLY:
(a) Renders column widths correctly, so that what you see in Excel when you create the web sheet bears a passing relation to what you see in the browser. This is SO refreshing after 9.5.2 (and many other versions, indeed every one I've used) having text that fits easily and comfortably into a cell when viewed in Excel, only to find that it's half truncated when it's rendered on a web browser.
(b) Similarly (oh joy, at last) the numbers seem to be a much closer approximation to what they are in Excel, instead of randomly becoming #### symbols because they're "too wide" unless you leave half the screen for them to fill out into.
(c) Action Buttons (whether as buttons or hyperlinks) also show correctly (the text is even aligned properly!) rather than the older style of rendering. I'm sure that the Excel-based rendering used x and y coordinates derived from the functions SomwewhereWithinABull'sRoarOfWhereTheyAreInExcel() with height and width values from the Random() and Ugly() functions.

Unfortunately I can't use it in production yet (or maybe not given the other bugs that have been reported), but once those are sorted out it'll be finally nice to have websheets that don't look like they were designed in crayon.