Reporting Application Integration... A Less Explored Feature

Reporting Application Integration... A Less Explored Feature

11.1.2 blessed us with lots of new features one of them is Reporting Application Integration. A reporting application is a target application on which you can report on and aggregate Planning data. The primary use cases:

a. The reporting application contains data from any source, such as a data warehouse. You want to push new Planning data to it and report on the data.

b. You want to report on Smart Lists in Planning, which you cannot do in Planning.

You can map dimensions between source Planning applications and reporting applications to enable:

a. Reporting on Planning data in a reporting application

b. Aggregating and querying on Smart Lists, which are converted to regular dimensions in the

reporting application

c. Linking Planning data to multiple reporting applications for various consolidations

If you look at the broader level it does nothing but to export data and load the data to the target

ofcourse with specified mappings. Mapping can be of two types: 

Dimension to dimension: Displays the available unmapped dimensions in the Planning

application. In order to push data, the dimension and all of its members must reside in both the

source and target applications. Dimensions that are identical between the Planning and

reporting applications (forexample, Scenario to Scenario) are automatically mapped.

Smart List to Dimension: Displays the available Smart Lists. When a Smart List is selected, the

account members associated with it are displayed. If there is only one member, it is

automatically selected.

Note: Smart List labels are used for mapping to member names or member aliases in the

reporting application.

If we don't want to link a dimension we have an option of No Link, when you select No Link 

option to a particular dimension, you can set the member for this dimension in POV section of 

mapping and map it to a differnt member. Ex: You can have Year Dimension Member Fy10 

mapped to Fy12.(Ex at the end)

Lets do some hands on:

1. We will create a simple BSO Reporting App with dimesion say Account, Period, Product, 

TypeOfAccount(This is for the smartlist mapping), Year, 

2. Planning App will have Account, Period, Entity, Product, Currency, Year, Scenario, Version,

3. We will do mapping,

4. Push data from Planning to Reporting App. we noticed that sometimes admin wants to run 

this push data to reporting in the background, so from version 11.1.2.1 we got a utility to push 

data from Planning application to reporting application.

Here is our BSO Essbase Reporting App:

Here is our Planning App:

Lets Map our Reporting Essbase BSO Application "Report" with  Planning "App3"

Lets create a new mapping for our reporting application, hit New:

Here I have entered ReportingAppMapping as the Mapping Name, as mentioned above App3 

is the source Planning Application Name and we are using Plan1 Plan Type, and selected 

Target App as Report with RedDB database. If you want to add one more Essbase Server you 

can use Add Server Option in the bottom Pane.

Here I am performing Dimension to Dimension mapping for Account, Period, Product and Year  

and Smart List to Dimension for Smart List Type of Account which is associated with Account 

Dimension Member Acc5.

Because rest of the dimensions are not a part of target reporting application we need to select 

POV from these dimension.  Hit Save.

We have  two option to push data, the first one clear the data for the particular section and 

reload it and other one will add to the  existing one Lets Push the  data to Reporting App.

If everything went fine  you will get a success message. 

 This was our data in Planning Application.

Data in Reporting App. 

 Now the Troubleshooting part, it took me two three times to make it work, below is the main 

error which I got:

This is the error which I got in Job Console, In my source Planning App Name of the Smart was 

TypeOfAccount and it has two Entries with Label Salaried and Current, Earlier I have crated a 

dimension name SmartList in Reporting App, which has two members ListMbr1 and ListMbr2, I 

though it will map it automatically, but at the end I found I need to create the members with the 

same Label, so I changed the structure like: TypeOfAccount with Members Current and 

Salaried and it worked.

Once it was successful, I checked the job console again (For our above ex.) found below:

 It actually created a .csv file and place it in the location mentioned.

I tried to find the import####.txt but it wasnt there.

Use of Not Linked Option During Mapping:

Year dimension was present in both source and target application, but in mapping  tab I have 

selected No Link for Year so it came in this fashion in Pov tab, Here I have performed a 

mapping from Fy09 to Fy12. Below is the data in reporting application after pushing data.

PushData utility: Pushing data to a reporting application can take some time, so 

administrators may want to schedule the data push during non-peak hours using the PushData 

utility. 

PushData [-f:passwordFile] /U:username /A:sourceApplication /M:applicationMapping [/C]

Here /C is an optional tag that Clears the data range in the target reporting application before 

pushing data.

Unsupported Features with Mapping Applications

Mapping applications to reporting applications does not support:

a. Aggregation storage database outlines with the “Duplicate Members Allowed” option 

selected

b. User variables

c. Attribute dimensions

d. Attribute member selections