Rules in Developers Guide

[par3]

Hey Guys.

I trained some people on the Developers guide this week and I had an interesting question. When you create the following rule in the Sales Summury cube :

[] = DB('Sales',!Product Summary,!Store Summary,!Month,!Year,'Actuals',!Sales_m);


it still works without it being fed from the Sales cube. Why is that? I always thought the rule will only work once it has been fed from the Sales cube.


Thanks people!

[Alan Kirk]

it still works without it being fed from the Sales cube. Why is that? I always thought the rule will only work once it has been fed from the Sales cube.

You may find this thread of interest on that subject...

[par3]

Thanks Allan. But that thread confused me even more!!! I don't think I will be able to send that as a responce to the question!!! lol

[Alan Kirk]

Thanks Allan. But that thread confused me even more!!! I don't think I will be able to send that as a responce to the question!!! lol

I know the feeling. But when you boil it down, you can explain it simply to non-technical folks in in one of two ways, albeit with a small risk of oversimplifying either way:
(a) TM1 rules run using Voodoo; or (perhaps and/or )
(b) If you use Skipcheck, TM1 rules will not work reliably and consistently unless they're fed.

In other words, don't worry about whether some values may be returned; just be aware that to ensure that the correct values are always returned then (for cubes which use Skipcheck) getting the feeder right is just as important as getting the formula itself right.

[Steve Rowe]

I'm not sure if this applies but one of the things to watch out for with rules and feeders is when you write a rule over an area that is populated with data.

So if you have data loaded, the feeder flag is present.
Write a rule over the same area, the feeder flags from the input data are still present.
Saving a rule sheet does not clear feeders from a cube.
Restarting the server which clears all the feeder flags would then stop the rule from working.

It's often overlooked that input data creates feeder flags too.
HTH you understand what was happening.

[wissew]

Thanks Allan. But that thread confused me even more!!! I don't think I will be able to send that as a responce to the question!!! lol

I know the feeling. But when you boil it down, you can explain it simply to non-technical folks in in one of two ways, albeit with a small risk of oversimplifying either way:
(a) TM1 rules run using Voodoo; or (perhaps and/or )
(b) If you use Skipcheck, TM1 rules will not work reliably and consistently unless they're fed.

In other words, don't worry about whether some values may be returned; just be aware that to ensure that the correct values are always returned then (for cubes which use Skipcheck) getting the feeder right is just as important as getting the formula itself right.

I totally agree withthe VOODOO part. You can learn to write a rule in an hour but it will take a life time to understand how feeders work.