The customer is using a custom time dimension with PMF 5.2.2, the 4-5-4 week calendar widely used in retail (months follow a 4 weeks - 5 weeks - 4 weeks cycle). We've loaded the calendar succesfully and measures seem to work ok, but when we use the month name/abbreviation in reports, PMF sometimes shows "wrong" month.

In our case the calendar start in February, that is month # 1, but the first two days of the month are Jan 30 and Jan 31. The same thing happens e.g. in month # 2, March, first day is Feb 28. PMF shows these month as Jan and Feb respectively, thought they should be Feb and Mar. Months that don't have this "day overflow" problem show then name correctly.

Is there a way to control the month name, either by a PMF setting or a custom procedure? I tried looking through the manuals and searching the Forum, but had no luck.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,
Mika

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Mika Keranen,

Mika,

The problem with weeks straddling months is that sometimes you want to display the later month and sometimes you want to display the earlier month. Currently there is no mechanism in the dimension loader to use custom time AND to say "Fiscal month 1 always corresponds to calendar month February". Currently, PMF arbitrarily uses the earlier month to display.

However there are workarounds.

The time display information is stored in table PM_DIM01_DISPLAY. This table gets refreshed by the Dimension Loader whenever you run a load of Time by program pmf_dim_tbl_refresh_dim01_display.fex. If you look at PM_DIM01_DISPLAY you will see that there is a key field DIM01_HASH (which is just a concatenation of the time level values) and DIM01_DISPLAY which is the value which actually gets displayed.

My first thought is that you could create a post processing step which pulls out the month value from DIM01_HASH and then updates the display value. Depending on how often you re-run the loader for the Time dimension and whether you anticipate upgrading to new releases of PMF you can either run this program directly, or you could add it into the end of pmf_dim_tbl_refresh_dim01_display.fex. If you choose to run this program directly, then you will have to remember to re-run the program whenever you load new Time values. If you incorpoerate this new program into the PMF code - then you will have to remember to add it back in whenever you upgrade to a new release.

Alternaitvely, you could modify the logic of pmf_dim_tbl_refresh_dim01_display.fex, or you could even go into your database GUI and just update directly against the DB.

Finally, here's a question for the general PMF community: Is anyone else running into this problem? If so, we would consider adding additional functionality to the loader to automate this step.

EricH

EricH,

Thanks for your prompt reply and explanation, we'll give this a try.

Cheers,
Mika