TM1 Forum

I'm using v8 and I have a vague inkling this might have been done in v9?? Either that or it's been mentioned before, perhaps in the Christmas wishlist.

Often when I'm doing reconciliations there is a rogue number and I'd like to see who put it there. At the moment the only option I have is to go through the transaction log to find out who did it when. I'd like to be able to right click on it and select "view cell history", which would tell me the changes that this cell has had in the last week/month/quarter. This would serve the same function as the transaction log, but only give me the current cell and do it in about five seconds and two clicks instead of three minutes and 40 clicks.

Is this already in version 9? If not, do other people see this as being a useful function?

Martin

Martin Ryan wrote:I'm using v8 and I have a vague inkling this might have been done in v9?? Either that or it's been mentioned before, perhaps in the Christmas wishlist.

Often when I'm doing reconciliations there is a rogue number and I'd like to see who put it there. At the moment the only option I have is to go through the transaction log to find out who did it when. I'd like to be able to right click on it and select "view cell history", which would tell me the changes that this cell has had in the last week/month/quarter. This would serve the same function as the transaction log, but only give me the current cell and do it in about five seconds and two clicks instead of three minutes and 40 clicks.

Is this already in version 9? If not, do other people see this as being a useful function?
Martin

No, it's not even in 9.4... but to be honest I'm not sure whether this could (practically) be implemented in the way you describe.

Short of storing the changes relating to a cell as in-memory metadata (which would blow out memory usage quite sizeably, I would think, especially during budget times when you can have people updating the same number multiple times a day as they try to tweak their bottom lines), the only way of getting this information is via the log files. Regardless of whether you go through the existing dialog, or go through a view cell history shortcut, that's going to take roughly the same amount of time. It's also going to be dependent on people continuing to store the uncompressed log files in the relevant folder.

I don't think that it's a bad idea, but I think it's more likely to be one that will be viable when we're all on 64 bit and have a truckload of gigs to hand so that the in-memory method is an option.

(Though having a shortcut to the logfiles would indeed cut down on the number of clicks needed to perform the query, and would be useful in that respect.)

If you bolt Cognos BI on top TM1 it is found within that. I know, they showed it to me in glorious technicolour yesterday.

we should be getting a demo of 9.4 in a few weeks, not sure if they'll do a Cognos BI demo with it but would be interesting to see what that front end is like.

I know where you are coming from Martin, its just the idea of being able to click a cell and automatically populate the transaction log selections, rather than having a view open then manually picking what you need. Problem is, what happens when you have consolidations? The logs only show what level 0 elements have been changed, so it'd need some funky coding to be able to select from a consolidation but actually search all of its level 0 kiddies...

When I worked for Infocat we had a piece of code that actually did this, was an extra add in called auditor.xls or something. Not sure what happened to it or where it came from....

Steve Rowe wrote:When I worked for Infocat we had a piece of code that actually did this, was an extra add in called auditor.xls or something. Not sure what happened to it or where it came from....

Steve, it was a special requirement for a workshop you and I ran back in Jan\Feb 2006. Applix were pally and helpful at the time and got it to us from product managemtn guys in US. We were told it was beta code and would be incororated in next release or 2 ( I forget what that would have been). However, since then appears to have vanished. May be worth chasing with themm, perhaps a question to Dave Corbet on 14 Oct?

Well, that'd be useful if there was an available tool, even if beta as I'm currently working through a method for doing this exact task at the second for one of our major project deliverables next year.

Currently working on an .xla addin attached to a right click menu in Excel calling perl script to query log files which would only work on lvl 0 elements - thought about ELCOMPN'ing it and passing multiple variables to the query but that way leads to both coding hell and "ooooh, I'll ask for any changes to Net Cash Balance for the whole company for the whole year" kind of queries from the user base.

Perl script stops the server freeze but I've still to really have a good think about how we're going to go about doing it. It's coming out as a pretty key requirement in the project so I'm loathe to just say no until I've investigated if we really can do it/realistic speed/etc. If there's a beta version kicking about of something that does this already, I'd be very interested in seeing how it functions.