Websheet export limit / Snapshot limitation

[JamiseBondi]

Hi,

We are using TM1Web in ver10.1 and some users need to snapshot some master data. The problem I have is that they aren't able to snapshot a cubeview due to (I think) the amount of master data involved. When I use perspectives I see there are 86000 elements to export. The users don't have perspectives, only tm1web. Is there a limitation as to the size of the export file or the number of elements in a snapshot through Tm1web?
Seems a tedious job to have to email or FTP or other way to get the files to the users rather asking them to snapshot it themselves.
Thanks in advance for your insight.

[lotsaram]

As far as I'm aware the snapshot and slice macros have never been updated and are still limited to a maximum of 64K rows (the old Excel limitation).

Yes it is a limitation but one that shouldn't have any practical consequences. If users are attempting to slice or snapshot more than 64K rows then you really have to question what they are doing and why. If data dumps are needed there are much more efficient ways of doing it both in terms of user wait time and system resources.

[Gabor]

You may check the setting for "MaximumSheetsForExport" in web.config.
Recent Perspectives versions, I think at least 9.5.2 and higher, support the full number of lines in Excel.
However, I can remember, there were problems with large snapshots: http://www.tm1forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8889

[JamiseBondi]

Hi Lotsa,

I appreciate what you've said makes sense - however I have a situation where a group of users needs to have master data from a cube to be able to do some offline planning and then paste back into TM1. As one of the master data cubes has a little over 65K items, what would you suggest is an efficient way to achieve this? Use a TI to export to a csv? but can a TI ask the user where to save the export? Any other ideas?
Thanks.

[JamiseBondi]

You may check the setting for "MaximumSheetsForExport" in web.config.
Recent Perspectives versions, I think at least 9.5.2 and higher, support the full number of lines in Excel.
However, I can remember, there were problems with large snapshots: http://www.tm1forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8889

Hi Gabor,

I can export from perspectives without a problem - it's only from the web that it times out. I checked the web.config file under this parameter and it's sitting at "100". It's the number of lines per sheet, not so much how many sheets I would have thought but I could be wrong here. I read the earlier post and it seems that a button to run a TI to generate a csv might be the best way - how would you give the user the opportunity to dump this csv file to their file system rather than on the TM1 server or other file server?
Thanks.

[declanr]

I read the earlier post and it seems that a button to run a TI to generate a csv might be the best way - how would you give the user the opportunity to dump this csv file to their file system rather than on the TM1 server or other file server?

You can pass in the path for output into the TI via a parameter but you would need the account running it to have access to place a file on everyone's local machines and also you would either need the users to know the full path (which could be a struggle) or you could predefine it for all of them and hold it as an attribute against the }clients dim... which seems like it would be annoying to set up.

Easiest option would be to create a share for all users that it outputs to and have the users pick it up from there. You could make it name the file something like their name and a timestamp so they know which is theirs and don't have issues with overwriting each other etc.

[JamiseBondi]

I read the earlier post and it seems that a button to run a TI to generate a csv might be the best way - how would you give the user the opportunity to dump this csv file to their file system rather than on the TM1 server or other file server?

You can pass in the path for output into the TI via a parameter but you would need the account running it to have access to place a file on everyone's local machines and also you would either need the users to know the full path (which could be a struggle) or you could predefine it for all of them and hold it as an attribute against the }clients dim... which seems like it would be annoying to set up.

Easiest option would be to create a share for all users that it outputs to and have the users pick it up from there. You could make it name the file something like their name and a timestamp so they know which is theirs and don't have issues with overwriting each other etc.

Thanks for the options Declan, sound thinking - I agree a common file server seems the easiest approach.

[Gabor]

I agree with Declan on that. I usually open a share on the server box, if IT policiy does not tell something different.
For larger applications I tend to use the TM1User() function to do a kind of sorting into subfolder without extra prompt in TI asking for a path.

[JamiseBondi]

I'm not sure if you guys have had this problem before but it's cropped up as a result of not being able to do snapshots in the web:

I have a dimension with lots of elements and a few attributes - more than 64K items so snapshots in the web won't work.
Users are trying to snapshot all elements in a dimension along with the master data associated with it. Some of these attributes are text and some are numerical. I have used asciioutput to dump a flat file to a file server but in order for the flat file to be useful it needs to have a pivot table used on it to create rows and columns. For eg.
elements 1 - 10 in the row, attributes 1 - 5 in the column and the actual values (text or numbers) in the body - as we would do in a cube view. The limitation I'm facing is that the pivot table is ignoring any text values and instead showing values of "0". Has anyone tried to pivot a flat file with text values?
I know this is probably an excel limitation (I'm still researching it) and I'll look on those forums but the source of having to use this method is due to the web snapshot limitation so I've added it in here in case anyone has experienced this problem, thanks.