TM1 Forum

cross-post from the soon to be deceased Applix forum

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

['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.

Yup, I can confirm that it's the same in 9.1 SP3. It's definitely the brackets which are causing the problem; I created a dim which was named identically aside from the brackets, and the rule compiled with no problem at all.

We've been here before, too... remember (apologies to those who aren't members of the old Forum, you won't be able to see this):
http://forums.applix.com/forum/tm.asp?m=12074

I have to agree with Mike L in the old Forum, though; you'll be lucky to get this fix in. The approach these days seems to be that "If it doesn't add something to a demo for new customers, don't bother with it". Thus we don't get the ElIsAnc worksheet function, or a proper security model, or...

I think this might be fixed in 9.4, but do not know for sure.

Don't get me started on the use of the @ symbol as the delimiter in Workflow dimension names ...

Eric wrote:I think this might be fixed in 9.4, but do not know for sure.

4 years? really? Wow!

just in case anyone was still wondering about this, it's still a problem even in 9.5.2

It doesn't cause me problems because I refuse to use anything other than a thru z, 0 thru 9, and _ in any of my TM1 (or any other system for that matter) objects. Better safe than sorry.

same here usually, but it had been so long that while i was putting some new models together i thought i'd try it again. at least in Windows if you try to name a file or path with certain characters it will tell you up front that you can't. shame TM1 doesn't offer you the same courtesy.