Troublesome Characters
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No, not Mr Kirk
but the wonderful non-alphanumeric characters that if you are not careful will cause all sorts of problems. If someone could please check this is also the case in the most recent 9.1, i'll then log it and add to the growing list of "things that «ahem» me off about TM1" in Cognos Insight...
Simple enough to test. Dimension with a string attribute. In my example the dim is called "Organisation Breakdown (pre-May08)" and the attribute is called "Parent". I have a rule (in the "}ElementAttributes_Organisation Breakdown (pre-May08)" cube) to calculate the parent as follows;
['Parent']=S:ELPAR('Organisation Breakdown (pre-May08)',!Organisation Breakdown (pre-May08),1);
The rule refuses to compile with an "invalid string expression" error. Now i know this works on } cubes because the current version of this dimension was the basis for this one, the only difference being the name is "Organisation Breakdown" and doesn't have any parathensis. I'm pretty sure its the non-alphanumeric characters in the dim name that is screwing this up, so the plan is to log an enhancement request to ban the use of non-alphanumeric characters in cube and dim names. Something along the same lines as XP when you try and name a file with a / in it
Now i'm sure that won't suit everyone, so if it is also an issue in 9.1 then my request will specifically ask for a switch to be added to the server config file to allow the admin to decide themselves whether they wish to ban the use of such characters or not. Something along the lines of AllowNonAlphaNumericChars = T/F should work nicely, with a default of T just so when people are upgrading etc they don't get their models messed up.
TIA
