Cubeviewer Title Dimension to use all Elements

[John Hammond]

Sorry folks, back on the topic of all again.

Lets say we have a dimension which is a simple list with no hierarchy: 2009, 2010, 2011. If I dont want to use this dimension as a column or row then I must set the dimension as a title dimension. This means the dimension must take a single value. My problem is that a lot of the time I dont want to screen on a title dimension.

Is there some easy way as in Excel Pivots to select all or have a named subset take precedence or even have 'Multiple Values Selected by User' in a Title Dimension.

The inability to exclude a dimension unless it has a single owner of the hierarchy makes it very confusing to be sure you are not accidentally excluding data.

[Alan Kirk]

Sorry folks, back on the topic of all again.

Lets say we have a dimension which is a simple list with no hierarchy: 2009, 2010, 2011. If I dont want to use this dimension as a column or row then I must set the dimension as a title dimension. This means the dimension must take a single value. My problem is that a lot of the time I dont want to screen on a title dimension.

Is there some easy way as in Excel Pivots to select all or have a named subset take precedence or even have 'Multiple Values Selected by User' in a Title Dimension.

The inability to exclude a dimension unless it has a single owner of the hierarchy makes it very confusing to be sure you are not accidentally excluding data.

The only way of having it as a title dimension which returns the values for multiple elements is to have consolidations of those elements. In the case that you describe above, it would be an "All Years" consolidation.

I'm assuming that you're talking about a user view here rather than a data source view, since in the latter it's best to stay away from the concept of title dimensions, row dimensions etcetera when doing data movements and just treat it as a flat file.

However to get the equivalent "Page Item" pivot table functionality, consolidations are the only way of doing it.

[John Hammond]

The only way of having it as a title dimension which returns the values for multiple elements is to have consolidations of those elements. In the case that you describe above, it would be an "All Years" consolidation.

Thanks for confirming this, Alan

Yes, it is the user view rather than the TI view I am concerned with here. What should happen:

User right clicks on Dimension and 3 options become available

All - greys out selection
Subset - screens on full subset displays subset name or 'multiple values'
Value - screens on single value as present.

I have a conundrum about how title attribute of view would affect TI Subselect. Would seting a dimension to title status cause:

A: The expected behaviour of screening on the subset associated with the view

OR

B: The CubeViewer action of screening on the first value in the subset.

Unfortunately I dont have TM1 available to answer this question but I will post as soon as I find out as it could be a really insidious error.

[Alan Kirk]

The only way of having it as a title dimension which returns the values for multiple elements is to have consolidations of those elements. In the case that you describe above, it would be an "All Years" consolidation.

Thanks for confirming this, Alan

Yes, it is the user view rather than the TI view I am concerned with here. What should happen:

User right clicks on Dimension and 3 options become available

All - greys out selection
Subset - screens on full subset displays subset name or 'multiple values'
Value - screens on single value as present.

I have a conundrum about how title attribute of view would affect TI Subselect. Would seting a dimension to title status cause:

A: The expected behaviour of screening on the subset associated with the view

OR

B: The CubeViewer action of screening on the first value in the subset.

Unfortunately I dont have TM1 available to answer this question but I will post as soon as I find out as it could be a really insidious error.

No it won't. "Errors" are only things which behave contrary to expectations. In this case, talking about user views and then suddenly talking about how they affect TI means that you're mixing and matching things which simply shouldn't be.

Display views are for users.

TI data source views are for data movement.

You should never use the two interchangeably. If you do, then as they say on the Cheezeburger network, "Ur doing it wrong".

Yes, they do both appear as views under the Views list. They should not, and people like Dan Bernatchez and Garry Cook have been saying this for years without anyone from Iboglix listening. However developers still need to see them as quite distinct types of object, and design accordingly. A TI data source view will not have title dimensions at all; everything will effectively be a row dimension. It will have whatever elements are in the subset that you assign to it, or if you don't assign a subset it will have all elements.

[Alan Kirk]

Yes, it is the user view rather than the TI view I am concerned with here. What should happen:

User right clicks on Dimension and 3 options become available

All - greys out selection
Subset - screens on full subset displays subset name or 'multiple values'
Value - screens on single value as present.

I have a conundrum about how title attribute of view would affect TI Subselect. Would seting a dimension to title status cause:

A: The expected behaviour of screening on the subset associated with the view

OR

B: The CubeViewer action of screening on the first value in the subset.

Unfortunately I dont have TM1 available to answer this question but I will post as soon as I find out as it could be a really insidious error.

Oh, I forgot to mention something else that's important as well. It sounds like you might have been considering the possibility of having users create views which would then be used as a data source for a TI process. Unfortunately that's unlikely to fly. If the users aren't admins, then they won't be able to modify a public view. And if they save a private view... TI won't be able to see it.

[lotsaram]

I have a conundrum about how title attribute of view would affect TI Subselect ...

I'm firmly with Alan on this one. Although a "user cube view" and a "data processing cube view extract" both exist without apparent distinction as "cube view" objects on the TM1 server they should not be confused and should be treated quite separately as they have quite distinct purposes. (Except for the probably rare occasion where you many wish to use a "user cube view" as a datasource to export a snapshot of data.)

But to answer your question "What affect will assigning a dimension as a title element have on TI processing?" the answer is basically "nil".

The important thing to remember is that TI does not see views as a user does. When TI processes a "view extract" all dimensions are treated as row dimensions and all subset members will be processed (or at least all members in accordance with the ViewExtractSkip... assignments). If the view is also used as a "user cube view" and has a title dimension assigned (and a title element) then the whole subset should be processed and not just the selected title element.

Mixing of user views and processing views is a bit problematic and not really good practice but this also brings up another point that when assigning a dimension as a title dimension for a "user view" it is vitally important to assign that dimension a subset. There are a few reasons for this:

• 1/ Unless a subset is assigned then subset ALL is implicitly assumed. When a view is calculated by a user or by TI with ViewConstruct a "Stargate view" (look it up in the manual) is created on the server which pre-calculates and caches not just the visible grid but also all "near combinations" or other subset members of the title dimensions. Especially if title dimensions are large then inappropriate choice of title subsets will be inefficient and dramatically slow down initial view calculation and stargate view storage as the server will be doing lots of work calculating combinations that it really doesn't need to.
  2/ Title elements are registered by index and not by name. If a new element is inserted into the subset above the current selection (or into the dimension if no subset is assigned) then the title element selection will change. This can cause endless confusion for end users and could invalidate or corrupt the view. (Especially if the title dimension has element security assigned and the element selection "shifts" to an element that some users have no access to!)

Perhaps these points are a little too technical for where you're at at the moment but I hope that helps or at least will do in the future.

[paulsimon]

John

If you have a license for Executive Viewer, then using that, it is possible to mark a Title Dimension as Invisible (Off-Spread in their terms). For the Off-Spread dimensions, you need to select a single element, so you will still need to have an All elements consolidated element in your dimension, but you can avoid the user seeing Title dimensions that are not relevant to them.

The other way of course is to slice to Excel and then hide the row that has the Title dimension.

Regards


Paul Simon