Groovy Series 6: Beauty of cscParams

While working with Groovy scripts, a common task is to dynamically generate an Essbase calc script capturing the edited members from the grid. This script should then be submitted to Essbase for execution. But the important task is to ensure these edited members when passed on to the Calc script are written in required Essbase format, enclosed in quotes.

In past we have been using various groovy methodologies to identify unique members and converting them to Essbase format concatenating with quotes, commas and spaces. How about if all of this can be done in one step my enclosing the entire collection in a method which spits out strings, enclosed in quotes and separated with commas ? Yes that’s what cscParams do for us.

Let’s look at the above script example, in Step 1, I declare an empty list and push the edited accounts from the COA dimension into the list. Step 2 and 3 define two ways of converting this list into a string which I can use either dynamically generate a Calc script or pass as an override member list while executing a smartpush. Step 4 prints the strings generated from both.

Because the grid I edited had both base periods and YearTotal on the grid, when members are edited at month level, the YearTotal also is marked as edited and edited members get repeated.

In the first print statement, I have to explicitly filter the unique members and on converting them to a string does not enclose them in quotes and have square brackets around members. This is the literal conversion of list into string.

The second print statement uses the cscParams function and just passing the list of edited members, it filters the unique members, enclose them in quotes and separate them by commas. This is exactly what is required when passed on to dynamically generated Calc script or list of override members in smartpush.

The third print statement prints the str string without filtering the unique members and using the old way of concatenating the list members.

Its quite obvious how cscParams saves the effort of filtering or concatenating the list in just single step. This can be captured in another string object as shown in above example to avoid rewriting the method multiple times.

Cheers !!!