Hyperion Planning Workflow
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- Created on Tuesday, 23 October 2012 17:48
- Last Updated on Wednesday, 17 April 2013 17:09
- Written by Howard Johnson
- Hits: 2487
If you are on Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.2x you'll have access to bottoms up workflow.
A good document to get up to speed on workflow is:
Oracle document ID 126783.1
In reference to "bottoms up" workflow whereby you can predefine the path for the promotion, so users don't have to select who the next approver will be, I take issue with a statement on page 28 of this document. Under "Take Ownership" it states: "Bypasses the current owner and lets you enter or edit data outside of the defined promotional path. Take Ownership is available only to users above the current planning unit owner in the planning unit hierarchy."
In reality, with bottoms up, only the level 0 owner (user not group) can ever write to the planning unit. This means that the take ownership does not allow editing of data, only comments.
The only exception is if the owner delegates the budget for that planning unit to another user that has access to the planning unit.
Another exception to allow others than the owner to write to the bottom level budget is to stop the planning unit. This will allow anyone with Planning security to write to the planning unit. This will also unfortunately delete any comments entered by the users.
Working in a locked down environment
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- Created on Thursday, 10 November 2011 19:52
- Last Updated on Wednesday, 17 April 2013 17:09
- Written by Howard Johnson
- Hits: 4541
When you are supposed to administer / develop Hyperion Essbase and you can't get to the server a few challenges are created.
-creating and getting to an export of the database is a little tricky. If you want to get the export off the sever it's next to impossible. If you run a report script you can actually have the output goto your pc. The drawback is that report scrips are close to the most inefficient process to run in Essbase
-replicated partitions: faster than report scripts but you have to deal with partitioning, a replicated partition will allow you to send data from one Essbase database to another while not having any direct access to the server be it Linux, Unix, or Windows.
-creating an export to use to import to another Essbase database: By default, Essbase will export data to the App folder on the Essbase server. Unfortunately, Essbase does not allow you to get to the essbase\App folder. There is a trick where you can export data to the database folder which you can access for importing. If in the export window (or in esscmd or maxl) you select something along the lines of data_file './sample/basic/basic_lev0.txt'; you will be able to import this into any database on this or other Essbase servers in your environment.
hj
Essbase Excel Tips Miscellaneous
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- Created on Thursday, 05 May 2011 17:09
- Last Updated on Wednesday, 17 April 2013 17:09
- Written by Howard Johnson
- Hits: 3774
Goal: attempting to find the level 0 members with the greatest number of generations.
Steps:in excel, native addin, performed zoom in bottom level, indention turned on for sub items. Then the formula:
=find(left(trim(a3)),a3)-1 will return the number of spaces preceeding the member label. The largest number indicates the member that has the greatest number of generations above it. It looks like for each indention, Essbase places 5 spaces.
I wanted to get this quick and not have to crack open the api. Smartview has some interesting query abilities with basic VBA from inside excel but I couldn't find anything that returned a level or generation number.
hj
What version of Hyperion should we be on?
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- Created on Friday, 15 April 2011 19:55
- Last Updated on Wednesday, 17 April 2013 17:09
- Written by Howard Johnson
- Hits: 2896
11.1.2.2 has come out. If you are going to implement workflow you will want to be on the latest patch level. The latest patch level will give you the ability to use "groups" for ownership assignment instead of just user id's.
11.1.2.2 appears to be a very stable version of the software. This could be due to my limited exposure of bugs by using Planning in classic mode. This means that I do not have to deal with EPMA. It has been a nice 2.5 years not having to touch EPMA.
Major difference:
Shared Services:
- In going to 11.1.2, the cssimport security tool has been removed but with a little trial and error, the lifecycle works pretty well.
- EAS security is directly linked to shared services meaning you no longer need to "refresh from shared services" security in EAS
Smartview:
- The connection is different once again. Instead of using a url, you'll be using a shared connection to get to Essbase.
Excel native addin:
- yes this still exists and works as desired.
Each customer should do their own due dilligence in order to make an informed decision about what patch level to apply. If you ask your consulting firm and they say "no, that's not a good idea", you should really think before overriding their decision. I know of a few customers that wish they had listened to such advice.
hj
Hyperion Planning Losing Substitution Variables
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- Created on Monday, 13 September 2010 17:54
- Last Updated on Wednesday, 17 April 2013 17:09
- Written by Howard Johnson
- Hits: 3652
In Planning 11.1.1.3 using EPMA, there seems to be an issue where the substitution variables are disappearing from business rules. I have not seen this issue with Hyperion Planning Classic applications. What makes this peculiar is that the business rules appear to run without issue.
One fix is to:
you need to go into each business rule one at a time and export them. Save them to your pc. It will be in .xml format. Once you have saved them all, try importing just one of them and see if the variable reappears. Then reimport each one of them one at a time. This seems to reregister the variable and suddenly it will appear.
This issue should not occur if you have the latest patches applied. At this time, calc manager is at patch 3 and planning has a patch 4 out.
I've also seen where:
-sometimes changing the default value does not take effect in the rule until you manually deploy the rule after updating the variable value
-once a variable is used, changing the default value, limits, or even the string that appears results in corrupting that variable. Every rule that used that variable is now broken until that variable is replaced with a new one. I had a bunch of rules.
tip: Make sure you allow at least 3 weeks to migrate your development to production.
hj