Personally I’m not a big fan of Essbase’s Dynamic-Time-Series (DTS) functionality; I believe in many cases building the desired functionality myself within the cube to be both better in terms of performance and usability. Perhaps this is just a result of my heavy experience with financial models that end at the Month level. There are however some situations where DTS is very useful – a specific case is when the Time dimension goes down to the Day or lower. In this case DTS is a very acceptable solution.
Unfortunately it’s plainly clear that Clarity never tested earlier versions of 7 with a model that included DTS. The members show up in odd places and at unwanted times including the page options dialog. [Authors Note:- August 13th, 2012] – This issue appears to be fixed in the Clarity 7.2.1 release. Original testing was on the release 7.0.1.
In the above example my cube has YTD, QTD, MTD and WTD enabled. It’s important to note I did not request these members in Studio nor would they do anything if selected, except most likely generate an error. The following image represent my Time member list in Studio – notice it’s simplicity nothing about the DTS member mentioned at all in my specification.
You can imagine how annoying this is to both the report builder and user. Thankfully there is 1 method to remove these erroneous entries from the list!
Before I get into the specifics of the solution it’s important to note that there are 4 methods that can be used to generate Clarity page options for Essbase:
1. Clarity Abstract (this is the term I use to refer to using default Clarity Studio functionality)
2. Snippet
3. Script of type Mdx
We’ll save the differences and benefits of each for another post, but it’s important to note that in the first 2 methods Clarity uses Essbase Calc Script to generate the page options list – which I believe is what causes the issue. The 3rd method uses MDX and thankfully produces a member set without the DTS members!
Steps
1. In the code area of the report or template find the Time member list to be fixed
2. Clear out the Clarity Abstract. The result will look similar to the following:
3. Type the following into the member list area:
4. Create an MDX statement to retrieve your result. Note this must be a full MDX statement including SELECT and the DIMENSION PROPERTIES required for Essbase page options.
5. Your resulting member list area will now look something like the following:
Running the template now produces the correct list!
If you are unfamiliar with MDX and a little hesitant to start writing your own I encourage you give it a try. Essbase has an MDX editor in the EAS Console which makes testing your scripts much easier than using Clarity. If you would rather have an OLAP Expert give you a hand send me a note and we would be happy to assist you.