Hi Team,

First, I'd like to thank Bob and company for helping us reach an important milestone at my current client. On Friday we deployed PMF to production with very little customizations. Yay!

Now that that's out of the way, we are going to be focusing on tweaking and customizing the product to meet particular business needs. I've already investigated some options in previous posts (IE. Time Dimension control on the ribbon instead of a Dim Tree).

I received an interesting report request today, and I am not sure of the best way to proceed. Picture the Measure Detail report, with three Actual and Target columns. One column set will show the current week values, the second column set will show the last six weeks (aggregated) and the final column set will show the last twelve weeks (aggregated). Another way of saying this is that one report would show three time periods for each BY field.

I haven't built a custom query in PMF yet, just worked with the pre-built objects. My understanding of the main PMF_BOOKLET query is that you can only pass it a single time range. With that in mind, I think I have two options:

I. run the PMF_BOOKLET query three times, passing a different time range each time, match it together somehow and display the output

II. write some custom code to hit the PMF_datamart directly, figure out a query that does what I want, embed it in a fex, reference the fex in a content page, display that in PMF

Option I requires me to get down and dirty with the guts of PMF, but I love a challenge.

Option II requires me to reverse engineer the datamart's ERD, and I have grave concerns about being able to parse the security model at the same time as I figure out the measures / dimensions / scorecards relationships.

I'd appreciate some advice on this topic, even if it's something like, "OMG, don't do THAT!" I'm still in the effort assessment phase, so anything is on the table right now as far as direction to take.

Cheers,

Joey

You might know about it, but the Management-Time Ranges gives you a great insight on how you can play with Time Ranges and Custom written reports within PMF.

Start Time Level/Value
End Time Level/Value

Above updateable values make things pretty easy.

Endre

For sure that is useful. I'm not sure that it helps with what I'm looking for though. Correct me if I'm wrong... You can define a time range, call it what you want and then feed a report that time code to make it display the range you developed. I need three different ranges, or at least one big range with three sub-groupings within that range. Is this something I can do with the time ranges management module?

Cheers,

Joey

You are correct
You can define as many time ranges as you want, and name them each. Each range can have it's Time Hierachy Level for both start and end point of range.

Write a fex with
-SET &TIME_RANGE = 'name_of_time_range' ;
inside of new fex

Add this fex to new Content in Management.

And I just exusted my knowledge about this...
:-)
Endre

Joey,
Option I plus suggestions from Endre are good.
Option II do not even consider, save yourself the effort and FOCUS on I (as you love a challenge ;-).

And keep us posted on your progress. You have an interesting request, that could turn into a worth while future feature.