Forum Discussion

BobNelson's avatar
BobNelson
New Contributor III
5 days ago
Solved

Syntax to pull entity description where entity NOT the POV entity

Is there a syntax to lookup the description of an entity that is NOT the pov entity?  In the example below the pov_entity is XXXXXXX_Canada, but the entity I want to pull a description from is 00250....
Cubeview
Finance
  • rhankey's avatar
    rhankey
    3 days ago

    If I understand correctly, your UD2 member names match the names of Entity members, and you want to surface the Entity descriptions for that of the UD2 members.

    I can think of at least two obvious options.

    Dynamically - Create a Dynamically Calculated member in UD8 that returns somthing like api.Members.GetMember(DimType.Entity.Id,api.Pov.UD2.MemberId).Description.  You would surface it into your Cube View as U8#[YourEntityDescFromUD2Member]:V#Annotation

    Metadata automation - wriite a Business Rule that copies that Entity Descriptions over to the matching UD2 members.  You can choose to copy to the destination Description, a cultural description, or a Text[n] property.  If copying to Descriptions, then simply display Member Descriptions for UD2.  If copying to a Text[n], you would still need a Dynamic Calc member to surface the description as an Annotation. 

MarcusH's avatar
MarcusH
Valued Contributor
3 days ago

The function XFMemberProperty might help you (search this forum for more info). It will probably mean you have to add the descriptions to a Text field though.

BobNelson's avatar
BobNelson
New Contributor III
3 days ago

Interesting idea, but ...

If there is no other option, we will have to weigh whether having a description appear on a report is worth having to burn a text field over.  I'm hoping there's another option out there, though.

  • rhankey's avatar
    rhankey
    Contributor III
    3 days ago

    If I understand correctly, your UD2 member names match the names of Entity members, and you want to surface the Entity descriptions for that of the UD2 members.

    I can think of at least two obvious options.

    Dynamically - Create a Dynamically Calculated member in UD8 that returns somthing like api.Members.GetMember(DimType.Entity.Id,api.Pov.UD2.MemberId).Description.  You would surface it into your Cube View as U8#[YourEntityDescFromUD2Member]:V#Annotation

    Metadata automation - wriite a Business Rule that copies that Entity Descriptions over to the matching UD2 members.  You can choose to copy to the destination Description, a cultural description, or a Text[n] property.  If copying to Descriptions, then simply display Member Descriptions for UD2.  If copying to a Text[n], you would still need a Dynamic Calc member to surface the description as an Annotation. 

    • BobNelson's avatar
      BobNelson
      New Contributor III
      3 days ago

      Thank you for supplying the correct syntax that I was looking for.  I had DimTypeId.Entity instead of Dimtype.Entity.ID.  Once I got this far I noticed that it would accept entity name as a string, instead of the entity ID.  This made the coding very easy for me.  Below is a snippet of what gave me the correct result:

      ' Dim mbr As String = api.Members.GetMember(dimTypeId.Entity, Ud2_EntityID).NameAndDescription
      Dim mbrDesc As String = api.Members.GetMember(DimType.Entity.Id,UD2_Entity).Description
      Return mbrDesc

       

      • rhankey's avatar
        rhankey
        Contributor III
        3 days ago

        Good.  It sounds like you were circling the solution.

        DimType.Entity.Id and DimTypeId.Entity are two methods that give the same result.  There are a number of other similar redundancies in the OS api.

        GetMember() can accept MemberName or MemberId.  Working with MemberId is more efficient.