TM1 Forum

Hi, I was wondering if it is possible to concatenate Element names and Attribute values using rules?

Example:
I would like to get text value : "PF - Car Manufacturing" in the alias attribute Plny_nazev.

I serached through the IBM documentation and oth this forum, but cant find combination of functions that would work. any suggestions? Thanks

Hi! Interesting! I've tried to find it in "TM1 Reference", and didn't find it either...

AttrS will retrieve a string attribute in a rule. I would expect this to work to populate another String attribute (I've never tried it) but I'm not at all sure that a rule will (or should) work to populate an alias. The problem is that an alias needs to be a unique identifier across the principal names and all other aliases, and if it's rules generated then there is no guarantee that you won't run into conflicts. When you update a dimension with the relevant functions, the server does a validation on that. If the aliases were to be dependent on other inputs, the server can't do that.

This is not to say that it won't work; I've never tried it and to be honest it's not something I would ever do in a production environment anyway for the reason specified above.

In a case like this I'd write a TI process to update the alias after each update of the dimension. I doubt that the dimension would be updated often enough to really NEED real time calculation for this.

You can use a rule to populate an alias in an attributes cube. We've done it to populate an alias on a product dimension where the caption is the concatenation of the SKU ID and item description attributes. As Alan says, things will get messy if you inadvertently have a rule evaluating to the same alias for 2 separate elements. When that happens, you will see an error in the server log like "Alias...for element...is invalid and has been set to blank". As far as I know, that would be the only indication that you have an alias conflict; you don't get the hand-to-forehead slap you would if manually entering a duplicate alias in the attributes editor. If you do decide to use a rule, I would say heed Alan's cautions and only use a concatenation rule to define an alias if you're absolutely certain that there won't be a conflict. If you can't be 100% certain and still want to implement, you can test for duplicate aliases with a TI process. You would spin through each element in the dimension comparing the index number of each element to the index of the specified alias for the original element.