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“Visualization gives you answers to questions you didn’t know you had.” – Ben Schneiderman . Undoubtedly, visualization is playing a vital role in today’s corporate world. The data is no longer confined to tables or worksheets, be it a CXO or analyst, its far easy to consume information and report via pretty visuals knit together into colourful dashboards. This has lead to an upward trend of visualization tools like Oracle Analytics Cloud (OACS), Microsoft Power BI, Qlik Sense, Tableau, etc. With each product bringing its own benefits to the table, it is important for the firms to invest in the best and harness each product’s capability. PBCS might be a leading planning and budgeting SaaS application but doesn’t offer all dashboarding capabilities or the varied charts available with Power BI. Similarly, Power BI or OACS are best for dashboards not for planning and budgeting. Not all firms invest in OACS with PBCS and tend to have a heterogeneous architecture of BI products. Thu...

PBCS or better known as Planning with the recent rechristening by Oracle, gives us an ability to export data into a flat file using our very own DATAEXPORT command in business rules. Lets see how this command have some interesting feature in cloud version vs the on-premise one. In the on-premise version (the one I am using is Planning 11.1.2.4.004.5 and Calc Manager 11.1.2.4.013.005) if we tried to generate a file name using any RTP, it would not allow us to validate the rule. Let’s say, we ignore the validation error and still deploy the rule, the rule executes but generates the file with the name “VisionData_{Year}.txt”, leaving no option to generate a file which could have dynamic names. Though this doesn’t seems to be showstopper in anyway as the data would have the RTP member inside the file, but considering we like to append date in YYYYMMDD format to the name, it would be impossible. Come to the world of cloud and Oracle has changed the way Calc Manager processes the RTP in the...

I thought of sharing a learning from a mistake I recently made when using CalcMgrDateToString function and hope you do not make the same. The CalcMgrDateToString accepts the date format which we like to return, say yyyy for years and MMM in Jan, Feb etc. The options for the date format can be picked up from Java’s SimpleDateFormat class and this is where things get ignored sometimes. The important thing to note here is the usage of yyyy vs YYYY as the parameter to the function. The function accepts both YYYY (all uppercase) as well yyyy (all lowercase) and both of these parameters return a different value. We might not see any difference in the returned value unless we use it with Dec 31st of any year. Let’s give it a try and see what happens. In the fist snapshot I am using simple code to return the year date part for 31st Dec 2019. Since Essbase stores the date values as YYYYMMDD, i have directly used the value 20191231 as first parameter and passed the second parameter as yyyy (all...

Creating members on the fly and Planning functions are no longer a new gig to boast about. In case you still need some hint, please click on above hyperlinks to navigate to Oracle guide to throw some light on them. How about we try to combine the two and come up with a unique requirement where we create a member of the fly and then use it with planning function ? Today I would like to talk about a similar scenario which was more of an attempt to use the planning function to get the start period of a scenario member and drive calculations by scenario start period rather than using substitution variables. This would enable same calculations being executed against multiple scenarios which may have different start periods. We can either have pre-created scenarios or give an option to create one on the fly. Let’s go with second option and be able to run some calculations on a newly created member via form. I created a scenario and enabled it for dynamic children. Cre...

When it comes to highlighting certain data cells or making them read only, we all must have got our hands dirty with validation rules and valid intersections. Undoubtedly, they make things quite descriptive and help to control data entry when required. But at the same time, the trouble to maintain all these objects is equally troublesome. Lets consider three random scenarios which client must have proposed to highlight certain cells on a data form or make certain cells read-only If the entity is E105 and COA member is among ‘A66001’ or ‘A82580’, colour it red If the entity is E100 and COA member is A65001 , colour it green If COA member is A84001 , make the first open period of scenario as read only Considering the above requirements, if we intend to implement them, we would have to create validation rules to highlight the cells and create valid intersections to make specific cell read-only. W hat if, we have multiple calculating scenarios which run in isolation, say Plan scenario wher...

Attribute dimensions are a boon when it comes to tabbed reporting or running member specific calculations or filtering data based on attributes but their management is bigger pain. In case these attributes require a regular update or association to newly created member on the fly, the only option is to go into dimensions and update them. Sometimes these could be challenge when users are new to Planning and taking baby steps in administering the whole application. All they could expect is a webform where all members and their associated attributes are listed to review and update, if required. Today’s post is going to talk about how metadata management could be made easy for new to Planning (PBCS) administrators by leveraging groovy. In this example, we have a project dimension with hierarchies for existing and new projects. Each project is grouped into domestic or international project tracked by an attribute dimension – Project Category and to determine whether project should be consid...

“With great power comes great responsibility” is what Oracle wants to remind us by assigning certain methods in Groovy classes as privileged methods. Privileged methods restrict executing these methods in groovy rules unless user has administrator privileges. Privileged Methods: delete: Delete method in the Member Class. This method deletes the member and all its descendants from Planning outline saveMember: saveMember method in the Dimension Class. This method returns the member that was created based on the properties map defined for the member execute: execute method in DataMap Class. This method executes the already defined data map in the application So what happens if a user with non admin privileges attempt to execute any groovy rule using any of these three functions? Here’s an example where a non admin user tries to execute a rule with data map and receives following error. It’s obvious that these three functionalities should be controlled and hand...