Tips and hints relating to the development of Financial Reporting Studio reports – Tips 2 & 3

When we left off on the last installment of Tips and Hints for Financial Reporting Studio, we had covered Selecting Multiple Members Based on Criteria, in this installment I intend to walk you through how to create a User defined Member List. Member lists are user-defined saved queries. Member lists can include members, other member lists, and functions.

Member lists
To define a member list:

• Double-click a dimension cell for which you want to assign a member.


• In the Select Members dialog box, take an action:


• In the Members or Lists tab, highlight the members to include in the member list, right-click inside the Available area, and then click Save Highlighted.
  


• Or once members have been selected and are contained within the Selected window, right click in the selected area and select save
  


• Click OK.


• Enter a name and description for the member list, and then click OK.
  








• Click OK to return to your report.
  

Two limitations that you should be aware of:

1. Do not use quotation marks (") when entering a member list. If you do, Financial Reporting saves the name with the quotation marks, but you cannot select the name later.


2. User-defined lists can be created only with Oracle Essbase as a database connection. The size of a member list cannot exceed 4K.
   

Assigning Multiple Database Connection to Grids

You can populate a grid with data from multiple database connections. After you define a grid's initial database connection and dimension layout, you can change the database connection for one or more rows or columns of the grid. You can define another database connection for each data row or data column.

You can preserve the members selected in the grid when changing database connections on a grid row or column. You must map all dimensions that are assigned to rows or columns in a grid from the current database connection to the new database connection. Dimensions on the point of view (POV) need not to be mapped.

To assign multiple database connections to a grid:

1. In a grid, select one or more data rows or columns for which you want to change the database connection.
   


2. In the Row or Column Properties sheet, click the Select Database Connection button, .
   


3. In the Select a Database Connection dialog box, select a database connection from the Database Connection drop-down list, then Click OK.
   


4. In the "Map Dimensions Between..." dialog box, map dimensions between the default database connection and the selected database connection. You do this by selecting a dimension from the pull-down list in the right column for each dimension in the left column.



5. Click OK.