Limited TM1 attribute functionality in C8 report studio

[Hevex]

Hi All,

Did anyone come across the same: If you are using a dimensional source (TM1 in my case) in C8 Report Studio, you cannot sum and group values
based on member properties (TM1 attributes).

As this is a key functionality under dimensional reporting I was wondering how this got resolved at other places.

Example:

Time dimension has month members (Jan-09, Feb-09, ... Jan-10, Feb-10), and has the month name
(e.g January /February / March) as attributes.

If you wanted a report to compare the seasonality through various years you would need to group your
month data regardless of the year. As of now you cannot do it easily under Report Studio as when you drag an attribute to the
Cross Tab the option "Insert property and group it" is greyed out.

Are you aware of any solution which would resolves this?

Thank you
Z

[happylouisc]

I guess a workaround would be to create one query for each year you have, a query for 2006 with all months, same for 2007 to 2010 for example. You'll end up with six queries which all have 12 identical members. Once done, use a Union Function to group all 6 queries and use the resulting query for your crosstab.

Never tried but I guess it would work, let me know!

-LC

[Herman Moller]

In TM1 world you have to be specific names for your dimensional hierarchy. If you consider a 2 Level Time dimension :

- Year / Month it would look the following:

2010
Jan 10
Feb 10
Mar 10
.
.
.
etc

What you could do is the following :

a) Create 2 attributes on your time dimension:

Month
Year

Element Month Year
Jan 10 Jan 2010
Feb 10 Feb 2010
Mar 10 Mar 2010

b)

Create a Filter on the Year to filter out the year you will want in your report.

You can also have your Financial Year / Calendar Year in the attributes of your time dimension.

Once you start using attributes they can make your reports a lot easier.

HTH

Herman

[Hevex]

Thank you for all the suggestions.

We have proceeded with the creation of a new dimension including only the month, in this way it is fairly easy to create the reports described above.

However you could not create every time a new dimension if you wanted to group data based on attributes in C8. I hope C10 will resolve this issue

Thank you
Zoltan

[paulsimon]

Hi

I come from more of a TM1 background than a BI one, however, some other approaches that have not been suggested yet, occur to me:

1) If year on year comparisons are a key requirement, you could design the cube with separate month and year dimensions. Then comparing January in one year with January in another becomes easy. You could create this as a virtual cube from your main cube which still has a single time dimension (There are some advantages to the single time dimension approach, particularly when it comes to companies changing financial years).

2) Create additional consolidations in the TM1 dimension. TM1 is happy to cope with alternate hierarchies, so you could create a prior year consolidation, eg

C 2010-04 PY
2009-04

However, the above approach may wait the layout easier.

Regards


Paul Simon

[Hevex]

Paul, your 1st suggestion worked fine, thank you for your help!

Zoltan