We have measures that are created in a Development environment that then need to be re-created in a Q/A environment and then re-created again in a production environment.

Is there an efficient way of copying the measure definitions to PMF in the other environments rather than manually creating every measure definition in the Manage tab in each environment?

Thank you.

This question has come up occasionally on the forum. See previous threads.

In general you can use snapshot/restore to move a mart from one environment to another. The alternative is manual creation. There's no way to move metadata between data marts yet.

We are thinking about how to accomplish this and the problem is that it isn't easy even if there were a copy function. If you copy a measure from one system to another, do you copy the load directives? How would differences in the source databases between the environments be handled? How do you deal with the fact that the systems might be not in sync in terms of the source data they are accessing? What should we do if the adaptor connections needed were not set up, or the master files were missing. And if the actual data was out of sync, which would pertain? You could have differences in Dimensions between the two systems, both in name and structure and values, and differences in Measure values between them.

No-one has yet responded on these questions, and we haven't got a design that makes sense for this yet. In 5.3, we're building some new capabilities that make measure and dimension creation and management of fiels and sources simpler and easier, but the whole question of how to move one or more bits of metadata between systems that are probably not in sync still eludes us.

We welcome your participation in the conversation regarding how to solve this.

thanks

What would be a step in that direction would a command or button to create a report with one click that listed all the parameters and settings for every measure definition.

This would make a handy checklist. This could also be the basis of a file that got "exported" from PMF in one environment and could be imported into PMF in another.

Regarding the issues you presented, just brainstorming... why not have this measure definition copy utility prompt the user for Y/N repsonses to these issues, and if the 2 environments are not 100% in sync in all aspects, then it only partially creates the measure definitions as much as it can safely do so. Even creating the measure names and descriptions and other such "safe" parameters would certainly be start and save time.

Well, hey! Progress: PMF does have the Administration reports which indeed do this.

If you look at Measures Load and Measures Metadata reports on Analytics, Administration, you'll have exactly what you need there.

You can even output these to Excel, thus making them saveable as worksheets.

This might make your life a bit easier...

thanks