Websheets with TM1 Applications

[kaazimraza]

Hi all,

I need some brainstorming and food of thought for using some existing web sheets in TM1 Applications. I have read about publishing web sheets into TM1 applications, though I have not worked this out in a production level project yet. However I have experience with TM1 applications where you publish views along with an approval hierarchy dimension.

In my project, we want to achieve the following;

a) Use existing web sheets which are not active form
b) Enable data capture with features like review, rejection, hence going for TM1 applications
c) Enable data capture through organisation hierarchy (accountants input data, their manager reviews it)

It's the third point above, point C that's confusing me, as there's no organisational hierarchy dimension in any of our cubes. One of our contractors did some quick test where he did assign a dimension as approval hierarchy but that dimension wasn't being used anywhere in the related web sheets. I am not sure if we can fake an approval hierarchy like this, and if there are any consequences of faking an approval hierarchy.

Our environment is:

TM1 10.1.1
Excel 2010
Users are authenticated using CAM via Active Directory

[tomok]

It's the third point above, point C that's confusing me, as there's no organisational hierarchy dimension in any of our cubes. One of our contractors did some quick test where he did assign a dimension as approval hierarchy but that dimension wasn't being used anywhere in the related web sheets. I am not sure if we can fake an approval hierarchy like this, and if there are any consequences of faking an approval hierarchy.

No, you're not going to be able to "fake" TM1. An approval hierarchy in TM1 is actually just another dimension in the cube. You have to have that dimension in all the cubes where you want to use TM1 to track plan progress. This means that what used to be an x dimension cube now becomes an x+1 dimension cube and all the DBRW functions in the web sheets will have to be modified. Search and replace can help you make this less painful but there's no way of getting around it.

[overflow]

I need some brainstorming and food of thought for using some existing web sheets in TM1 Applications. I have read about publishing web sheets into TM1 applications, though I have not worked this out in a production level project yet. However I have experience with TM1 applications where you publish views along with an approval hierarchy dimension.

In my project, we want to achieve the following;

a) Use existing web sheets which are not active form
b) Enable data capture with features like review, rejection, hence going for TM1 applications
c) Enable data capture through organisation hierarchy (accountants input data, their manager reviews it)

It's the third point above, point C that's confusing me, as there's no organisational hierarchy dimension in any of our cubes. One of our contractors did some quick test where he did assign a dimension as approval hierarchy but that dimension wasn't being used anywhere in the related web sheets. I am not sure if we can fake an approval hierarchy like this, and if there are any consequences of faking an approval hierarchy.

The key is in the definition of how the accountants see the data (what slice do they see), and at what level their manager reviews / approves / rejects it.
You need a single dimension with elements which can be uniquely assigned to individual accounting roles, and these elements consolidate to that which the managers should see (such as cost centre). That should be your approval hierarchy. Otherwise tomok is right; you will need to add a dimension to do this, along with the pain tomok describes:

all the DBRW functions in the web sheets will have to be modified

.
Without that you will not be able to assign user groups (e.g. accountants) to an element or group of elements (e.g. cost centre) in the approval hierarchy.