Referencing text box in parameter of TI/Action Button

[tosca1978]

Hi all,

I have an excel worksheet which the end user will access via TM1 Web. It shows variances between actual and forecast and has a cell for the end user to add a comment before submitting his work.

The cell containing the comment is a named range called "Comment". There is an action button that kicks off a ti which has the following parameters: pActivity, pUser, pDate, pComment. The pComment parameter has this value "=Comment".

This works fine and the comment is submitted to the commentary cube, the activity status is changed to submitted etc.

However, I wanted to improve the look of the form by using a text box rather than a cell for the end user to enter commentary. I have created a text box and made it a named object called "SubmitterComment". I have referenced this in the TI parameter with "=SubmitterComment".

The TI runs, but instead of the testing text that I wrote in the text box being entered into the Commentary cube, the text "=SubmitterComment" is entered there instead!

I would be interested to know if anyone has had success referencing text box's as named objects in the parameter of a TI before (and if so could point out where I'm going wrong).

Many thanks

[lotsaram]

TI parameter values can pick up either a literal string, value from cell reference or value from named range (which is just a lookup to a cell reference).

You may have named your text box but this does not make it the equivalent of a named range. If you enter =SubmitterComment into an Excel cell as a formula I'll bet that Excel returns a #NAME? error. At least there is some error checking behind the TI parameter where as you have given an invalid range reference it instead assumes that you wanted a literal string that just happened to start with "=". I think you are expecting too much, you can't really expect the TI button parameter validation to search through all embedded drawing objects for a matching name and take the string value of the contents? What would then happen if a text box shared the same name as a named range? Also drawing objects are not supported in TM1Web and one of the design philosophies of action buttons is there should be functional equivalence between Excel and web so taking a value from an object that wouldn't even be there in the websheet version would not be a great idea.

So I think you need to stick with a named range and entering comments in a cell. If you need the comment cell to be more "poppy" you will just have to give it an outline with some picture objects or something like that.

[tosca1978]

Hi Lotsaram,

thanks for your reply. That makes perfect sense. I'll stick with the cell/named range for the commentary input.

Cheers