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Recently, I was asked a question by my colleague, Linga  (he always comes up with something or the other) - Can we pull file names from a directory and process the latest one out of them, while keeping the history of processed files ? I could recall that one other colleague Parasuram PJP did something similar. When I tried out his code, that did not work for me due to some reason. Anyways, he was kind enough to share some pearls of wisdom and I sat down searching details about Jython to fetch file names and additional information. To find out the latest file out of all, we need to capture the timestamp of its last modification. Since we need to keep a log of all files which gets processed, we will be maintaining a RDBMS table (SQL Server in my case) -  FILENAMES with following structure Along with this comes a twist where initial part file names will be same having different suffix. Just to simulate the scenario, I could think of some files which were ...

The most commonly used reporting tool with Hyperion setup is the Financial Reporting aka HFR. HFR brings with it, the ability to design reports using various datasources - Essbase, Planning, SAPBW, MSOLAP, HFM. It has been quite popular to burst static PDF reports using inbuilt scheduler or using the command line utility for Essbase, Planning and HFM. Along with HFR, SmartView is another tool used for reporting. SmartView provide options to download HFR reports in spreadsheets and carryout analysis as most analyst love to do. One common requirement which HFR do not offer as an out-of-box solution, is the ability to burst reports in spreadsheets. This post delves into an alternate approach to cater such requirements. The Smart View has been enhanced lately to include lot of new capabilities - Retaining Excel based formatting, butterfly reports, multi-grid reports, etc. - which combined with its macros functions help analysts design, automate and burst spreadsheet based reports ...

Disclaimer: The steps mentioned in this post are a workaround and in no scenario intend to replace standard steps of migration published in Oracle documentation. Please take necessary backup before following these steps. These steps may help  to import artifacts when we do not have configured environment from 11.1.1 release to follow upgrade path. I wanted to setup a Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.3 environment to try out new features under this release and thought of creating an application from the extract files of one of my app which I had used long back for training and proof of concept. I created a new Planning app shell similar to the app I was about to import. Since 11.1.2.3 LCM offers ability to upload the LCM extract from shared services console in to File System directory ( import_export by default) , I followed these steps to upload the LCM extract. On trying to open the app under the File System, it did not display any of the artifacts in the detail pane. I...

It has been a long time that I posted anything , and thought of writing something I have been working with lately – ODI. Recently, I was training few newbies in ODI when I was asked a question – “How can we be sure whether we have developed an interface which is an efficient one? “ I guess there is no standard answer to this question. It all depends on the technology we are working with and the transformation we intend to achieve. We need to remember that ODI utilizes the underlying technology to perform its transformation and as a developer we need to make use of it in the best way. In the following post, I will be talking about the process of analyzing our data sources and technology to improve integration process. Let’s consider following scenario and data sources: Flat  File called Products.txt which stores information about product codes Staging DB which stores a Translation table. This table has the Alias names for all the product codes which should be popu...

Today, I was asked a question by one of my colleagues regarding the shared services and the roles used in Hyperion Planning. He was supposed to do some documentation and wanted to determine what does HP:0001 or HP:0002 mean. This is not limited to Hyperion Planning, Shared Services maintains a unique id for each role which is assigned to each group or user when they are provisioned in shared services. These internal id can be exported using Life Cycle Management (LCM) but they do not provide easy names like Planner, Interactive user, etc. We can fetch this information from the relational tables of configured Shared Services. There are two tables which maintain this information - CSS_ROLES, CSS_ROLE_LOCALES. CSS_ROLES contains information about the internal ID, Product Code, Role ID and CSS_ROLE_LOCALES contain names of these role ids in different locales. All we have to do is run a SQL query joining these two tables on IDENTITY_ID fields. Following is a sample query for p...

Lifecycle Management is the widely used option to export application artifacts for migration and backup. Starting 11.1.2 LCM also offers the ability to export data and can be selected while defining the migration definition.   I wanted to setup a backup process to export application artifacts and used LCM. All seemed OK until I encountered an issue with LCM and wanted to share via this article. Lets reiterate the steps I followed and identify the error ourselves. I selected all artifacts including data.   I defined the migration to export all the artifacts to file system and scheduled it to run as a job to export all the artifacts on Essbase server. Just to brief  you on how to do achieve this is to write a batch script which calls the LCM command line utility with migration definition xml and path to export all the artifacts to desired location. On testing it, everything executed well as scheduled. It was after few days when my scheduled job f...