Why is there no "View" dimension in Data Buffer ?

[Sergey]

Dear community,

I am working on some Data Buffer and I noticed something :

As you can see (if it's not too small ...), the Data Buffer is not taking into consideration the data units (that makes sense) and not the View dimension either.

However, the data units will have the dimensions : Cube, Entity, Parent, Consolidation, Time, and Scenario.

--> Hence, where is the "View" member in all that ? Am I missing something ?

Regards,

[chris_rothermel]

Hi Sergey,

I had the exact same question when reading the Finance Rules and Calculation Handbook.  See page 45 figure 2.12 (image below).  I wrote in my copy of the book "Where is the View dimension?"  Well the View dimension is special with respect to Data Units and Data Buffers.  It is not part of the Data Unit but it controls how the data is presented in your Data Buffer.  The View dimension effectively performs an additional calculation on the data on how it is loaded to the data buffer -- i.e. Periodic, MTD, QTD, HTD, YTD. 

Know that the underlying database tables store all of the data as YTD and often you won't need to specify the View dimension -- if you want A#Account1 + A#Account2 you don't need to specify the View dimension.

I hoping for my DescribeDataBuffer method to be in release 8.3 and that tool will be a good aid for understanding the data buffer better.

Chris

[chris_rothermel]

[chris_rothermel]

Also, I have some mnemonics to help remember the contents of the Data Unit and Data Buffer

Every Person Can Save Time = (Cube) Entity, Parent, Consolidation, Scenario, Time

View All Fat Orangutans Including Ugly Ocotopuses = View, Account, Flow, Origin, Intercompany, U1-U8

Yeah, I do include View in the Data Buffer category. 😉

[JackLacava]

The View member is effectively a virtual dimension, since all numbers in the database are YTD - they just get dynamically converted to other formats on request. Hence we don't keep any reference to it in DataBuffer objects, since they are largely meant to be low-level raw objects.

If you work with non-YTD formats, you will have to keep track of that yourself.