TM1 Forum

In the }HierarchyProperties cube you can specify names for the various levels in the regarding dimension hierarchy.
I was wondering about the situation where you have multiple hierarchies in a dimension.
Is it possible to extend the }Hierarchies dimension with additional Hierarchy1, etc. elements for the additional hierarchies and use this to specify named levels per hierarchy?
Please your advice on this. I'm currently not in a situation where I can test this.

TIA, Michel

Hi Michel:

Short answer:
* Can you add Hierarchy1, Hierarchy2, etc?: YES
* Does this do much of anything useful in terms of presentation (through Cognos BI, for example)?: NO, Not that I can see.

It seems like the }Hierarchies dimension is there for the purpose of supporting multiple hierarchies, but since it defaults to only having 1 element out of the box I doubt there's much you can do with that information, should you populate it. I tried adding an additional hierarchyN element to the dimension (via TI) to see what happened and it certainly let me do it. Cognos BI doesn't seem to care about/support another hierarchy definition, though - it just lumps everything by level into the named level buckets you defined for the first hierarchy. Not pretty, but less ugly than what you see if you try to use named levels with a dimension with a ragged hierarchy in Cognos BI...

There are some TM1 API functions out there relating to hierarchies; I doubt they're documented in much detail anywhere (the 9.5.2 guide mentions the TM1DImensionHierarchies property function, but only in passing). They do appear to be implemented as a list property off of a dimension, which means in theory that they'd support multiple hierarchy definitions for a dimension. So, if you wrote your own UI that used the TM1 API you might be able to leverage multiple hierarchies through the }HierarchyProperties settings, but there are a lot of assumptions that go into this statement!

Regards,
Mike

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your reply. In the meantime I had the opportunity to test this myself and (as described by you and assumed due to the fact there's nothing mentioned on this in the documentation) the }Hierarches dimension in the }HiearrchyProperties cube indeed doesn't seem to have any function whatsoever. Mayby it is in there for future support on multiple hierarchies...
Currently it's a pain that there is no support for multiple hierarchies - you need to be very creative in structuring the hierarchy and naming the levels.

Michel