Hoping for some direction as reading through the manual and googling for hours hasnt helped.

I have a report that has a CUBE or an ESSBASE back end.

Report runs fine, but the end user wants the ALIAS of the column to show up.

I popped open Essbase in excel and can see all the measures/columns etc and also an option to "Use Alias" which gives the data more information.

So rather then saying "REGN.61" if i were to use alias I can see "Northwest Region 61"

I tried using _CAPTION to see if it could pull something but doesnt work...

Does anyone know if its possible to use the column alias for an essbase report?

Im working on WF 7.6 and moving to 7.7

Thanks in advance

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Rodney Chan,

Did you check the Adapter Administration for UNIX, Windows, openVMS, IBM i, and z/OS guide? (that's quite a title). There is a whole section there devoted to "Using the Adapter for Essbase".

In particular, there is a little sub-section there about fields aliases available when creating a synonym:

quote:

Make alias fields

Select the Make alias fields check box if you wish to create fields that expose the values
in your alias table. The alias table can provide meaningful field values or field values in a specific language.

quote:

Originally posted by njsden:
Did you check the Adapter Administration for UNIX, Windows, openVMS, IBM i, and z/OS guide? (that's quite a title). There is a whole section there devoted to "Using the Adapter for Essbase".

In particular, there is a little sub-section there about fields aliases available when creating a synonym:

quote:

Make alias fields

Select the Make alias fields check box if you wish to create fields that expose the values
in your alias table. The alias table can provide meaningful field values or field values in a specific language.

Woot woot that sounds promising!!

I will talk to my admin guy to and look up that guide as well.

Would it happen to have some examples as to how to "use" the alias in FEX code?

Like would i simply use a different column name or something?

I took a brief look at it here

http://ecl.informationbuilders...in/source/opener.htm

and wasnt too sure where to go, im still in the process of digging around

Hey Rodney, you were on the right place, just one click shy of where you needed to be

I actually found a section under Using Adapter for Essbase called Essbase Reporting With WebFOCUS.

Though I did not dig deep enough, it seems to focus on reporting features particular to Essbase so it may be worth looking at.

Sorry I do not use Essbase or any other cube-based engine for that matter so I'm afraid there's not much I can suggest other than pointing you to the docs.

Do let us know what your findings are so other Essbase professionals (who knows? that could be me in the future) know how to proceed in a case like this.

Many thanks njsden!!!

So i spoke to my webfocus admin guy and was able to find an option when creating the master file to "Make alias field"

This is a little check mark in one of the pages that he uses to generate the master file.

When looking at the master file after selecting this option you will notice a few changes.

Without this field, in the master file you will see that to pull the data the column name may be like

 DIMENSION=Location, CAPTION='Location', $
  HIERARCHY=Location, CAPTION='Location Levels', HRY_DIMENSION=Location, HRY_STRUCTURE=STANDARD, $
    FIELDNAME=LOCATION, ALIAS='Gen1,Location', USAGE=A8, ACTUAL=A8,
      WITHIN='*Location',
      PROPERTY=UID,  $
    FIELDNAME=GEN2_LOCATION, ALIAS='Gen2,Location', USAGE=A8, ACTUAL=A8,
      WITHIN=LOCATION,
      PROPERTY=UID,  $
    FIELDNAME=GEN3_LOCATION, ALIAS='Gen3,Location', USAGE=A24, ACTUAL=A24,
      WITHIN=GEN2_LOCATION,
      PROPERTY=UID,  $...... 

In this example i would use GEN2_LOCATION in the FEX to pull the corresponding data.

After using the "Make alias field" option the master file code changes like so

 DIMENSION=Location, CAPTION='Location', $
  HIERARCHY=Location, CAPTION='Location Levels', HRY_DIMENSION=Location, HRY_STRUCTURE=STANDARD, $
    FIELDNAME=LOCATION, ALIAS='Gen1,Location', USAGE=A8, ACTUAL=A8,
      WITHIN='*Location',
      PROPERTY=UID,  $
    FIELDNAME=GEN2_LOCATION, ALIAS='Gen2,Location', USAGE=A5, ACTUAL=A5,
      WITHIN=LOCATION,
      PROPERTY=UID,  $
    FIELDNAME=GEN2_LOCATION_ALIAS, ALIAS='Gen2,Location_ALIAS', USAGE=A8, ACTUAL=A8,
      REFERENCE=GEN2_LOCATION, PROPERTY=CAPTION,  $
    FIELDNAME=GEN3_LOCATION, ALIAS='Gen3,Location', USAGE=A7, ACTUAL=A7,
      WITHIN=GEN2_LOCATION,
      PROPERTY=UID,  $..... 

There are extra fields now with the word ALIAS appended to the end, so in the new master file with alias you see GEN3_LOCATION_ALIAS.

Originally it was just GEN3_LOCATION.

Using this in the fex, you can now see the ALIAS fields, which usually provides more info then a generic piece of table data. So no fancy coding needed, just need to get the right field

Very nice!. We both learned something here