Feeder - for substring in a formula

[nickykoller]

Anyone know how I feed this formula?
['Actual', 'Flag', 'SERITD'] = N: IF(SUBST(!Employee,1, 3) @= 'OUT', 1, Continue);

[Martin Ryan]

You'll have to over feed as there's no direct feeder to use.

What's something that an "Out" employee will always have. Perhaps a salary? Or a pension? Use that to feed it. E.g.
['Salary', 'Actual', 'Flag'] => ['SERITD'];

I'm pretty sure that won't be directly usable, but it should give you an idea of what you might be able to use as a surrogate feeder.

Martin

[nickykoller]

Unfortunately there is no other data for them.
They are outsourced contractors that I need to assign their printing costs to based on their access cards.
Effectively I want to take all employees that have the id of OUT* and put a 1 in the 'flag', so that I can assign their costs to the IT dept.

My other alternative is to do it within the Ti process, but the formula does actually work well (apart from the feeding?!!)

[tomok]

Anyone know how I feed this formula?
['Actual', 'Flag', 'SERITD'] = N: IF(SUBST(!Employee,1, 3) @= 'OUT', 1, Continue);

Why do you need to feed? If this is just a flag to know whether to calculate a value later in the rules it is not necessary, unless you need to consolidate the value of SERITD.

[asutcliffe]

My other alternative is to do it within the Ti process, but the formula does actually work well (apart from the feeding?!!)

I'd likely opt for TI as the flag isn't going to change. I'm making a few assumptions but you might think about using an attribute on the Employees dimension rather than a measure in the cube. If you're building the dimension via TI anyway, it's trivial to populate the attribute as you go.

Back to your original question, in some cases you can feed more tightly using a conditional feeder:

['Salary', 'Actual', 'Flag'] => DB(If(SUBST(!Employee,1, 3) @= 'OUT', 'Cube Name', ''), !dim1, !dim2, ...);

You still need something like 'Salary' to feed from though and there's a performance/complexity trade off. It's really not much use here but can come in handy.