You can add rules (or “formulas”) to a cube in IBM Planning Analytics to create complex data calculations based upon your organizations business rules. Rules can do a variety of things, such as override consolidations that are occurring in the cube, calculate values (like sales = units multiplied by item price), and so on. But Planning…

As IBM Planning Analytics (PA/TM1) developers we often find ourselves in need to manipulate attributes in a dimension. This manipulation may be with the purpose of creating said attribute or populating it with data. We assume here the manipulation will be done via the Turbo Integrator (TI) tool. So, any manual interaction with attributes is…

This article is the second part of a 3-part series exploring attribute manipulations with Turbo Integrator (TI) processes. In Part 1 of the series, which can be found here, we saw how to check if an attribute exists and insert it and then how to check its type. We will now continue with a more…

This article is Part 3 of a series called Advanced Attribute Manipulation. You can find Part 1 which describes a few functions used to check if attributes exists and how to check their type HERE. And Part 2 about useful functions that looping through an attribute dimension and perform tasks with a subset HERE. Our…

Ranking reports are simple, yet powerful end-user reporting tools. Providing the ability for a user to add a ranking to a report or view of data based upon criteria that they are specifically interested in without having to have a developer or application administrator involved can be invaluable. IBM Planning Analytics Workspace users can enhance their…

Picklists are not a new concept. They exist in many applications, including Web pages. Perhaps you know them as “selection lists” or “drop down lists”. As a refresher, a picklist is a list of valid values for a specific element or cube cell. When you define a picklist for an element or a cell, a…

IBM defines a cube as “…the basic container for data…” and a cube view as “…the definition of how a cube’s dimensions are arranged…”. Planning Analytics cubes can each have multiple views defined and typically, each cube will have specific views designed to assist with common reporting needs. Common Views In addition to defining various…

The modeling workbench was introduced in IBM Planning Analytics and remains available as a beta feature (in 2.0.65). You can now open the modeling workbench from the Planning Analytics Workspace environment (in earlier versions entry was through a separate URL).  You can use the workbench to do almost anything you need to do within a…

Did you know that you can override the standard Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) theme with your own “custom theme” that reflects your corporate branding or culture? You can use a custom theme to: Modify the colors of the application bar Modify the colors of the navigation bar Set the corporate title that is shown on the home…

IBM Planning Analytics (PA) subsets can be made dynamic by using multi-dimensional expressions (MDX). Doing so allows for automation and will ensure that subsets update if the dimension changes.  MDX allows for many different use cases such as filtering by attributes, levels or using a wildcard search to display all elements that meet a specific…