TM1 Forum

Hi Everyone,

I am new here. Been working on TM1 for past few months. I can use some help..

We have a requirement where User has asked us to create a slice of a cube's view. Now, I know that sounds straight forward but the tricky part is that User wants to be able to retain the picklists that we have in place for few of the fields. And they want all this without the need to connect to Perspectives every time. They just want a dump of the entire cube view with the drop downs(In case you are wondering, this is because their plan is to use this excel and enter some more rows and then submit it back into the cube). Is this possible?

I initially thought we could use the Excel Data Validation feature but unfortunately TI doesn't have anything where I could open an existing excel and just update the drop down values in a hidden sheet. I thought Excel Macros might come to my help, only to find out later that TM1 Web does not support Macros

Please let me know if any one has any suggestions.

I suppose you create something using the API (Using VBA) with predefined login details, but do they really expect to able extract information without connecting to where it's coming from? They'll be asking for a lottery win without buying a ticket next.

It's quite easy to create combo online/offline templates but you really need VBA to make them work seamlessly. Why the need to be compatible with TM1Web if the users are only going to use them in Perspectives and Excel? You can't always have your cake and eat it too when you are talking about input templates that have to work in both Perspectives and TM1Web. Yours is one of those cases. If it needs to compatible with TM1Web then users are not going to be able to effectively take it offline, work with it, and then re-connect and update.

If you have a look at the Automation section of the CAFE documentation I think you might find something like what you are proposing, though there will still be a requirement to connect back to the TM1 Server (unless you want to slip in a "random number generator" in there to pull numbers from thin air... ).

What is the reason they don't want to be logged onto the server?
Are they having performance issues with the refresh of the TM1 DBRW fromulas etc?
Or they want to have access to TM1 without having a TM1 ID?

If it really must be offline from TM1, another thought is to push the data into an SQL server (or similar) and have VBA to execute scripts to refresh the data...

Thank you for all the replies people. We didn't want to waste too much time with this.

Here is what we did. It's not the perfect solution but the quickest way we could think of:
Built a process to export the dimensions used in dropdowns into an excel file(Dropdowns.xls) and scheduled it for everyday
Asked user to just keep this dropdown.xls open and run a VB code(using a command button) in another template file that picks up values automatically from dropdown.xls and creates drop downs.

Regarding the above question, yes the concern they had was with the performance. It was quite slow. This way its a bit better.