Hi Team,

I've got some Measures in PMF that have some Dimensions associated to them, and this has worked fairly well for my users for about a year. In fact, this has worked so well that they have grown to understand that they need to consume these measures in ways that were never imagined in the past. There are two fundamental changes that they want, both of which are related:

-the ability to multi-select dimension values
-the ability to exclude or include dimension values (multi-selectable, of course!)

At first glance, these two items do not seem to play well with PMF. However, I am a believer in framework applications versus custom coding. I have the first glimmerings of an idea about how to accomplish this using the dimensional model within PMF:

-multi-select could be accomplished by defining a parent dimension value that contains the desired child values. The downside is that this is not very flexible, as it would require dimension changes every time the grouping requirements were modified. Still, it's one possible path
-the ability to exclude dimension values is tricky. I am thinking about a flag based key system, but my concern is that I might end up inflating my record count if I have to store every combination (EG. These numbers exclude these values, these other numbers include these but exclude those). I still don't see this part clearly, but I am trying to work through it conceptually

I am writing this post because I wonder if I'm missing something very obvious? As far as I know, PMF does not do multi-select on dimension values and it only allows EQUAL TO filters, not NOT EQUAL TO filters, correct? If this is so, as I think it is, what do you think about my admittedly hazy ideas about how to shoehorn this functionality into the system?

Cheers,

Joey

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Moogle,

Multi-select is on the feature list for the 5.3 track. It will probably not be in 5.3.0 but it will show up during the 5.3 release progression.

Very complex boolean operations are largely a niche interest. For this we recommend a custom report or gadget against the PMF data. You can get most of what you want using Dimensional intersections. Right now you CAN do (Product = Toasters) AND (Location = Chicago) AND (Year = 2011). With multi-select you'll be able to do (Product = (Toasters OR Microwaves)) AND (Location = (Chicago OR Detroit)) AND (Year = 2011)

thanks