A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 2.4 – Deleting (and building) dimensions programmatically

Part four of three

In my innumerate fashion, we have now reached the fourth part of a three part series on building dimensions. Why can’t Cameron count? Putting aside the more obvious, “’Cos he’s an idiot” answer, the reason is I had planned part three to include code to generate dimension deletes via the Metadata Builder. That was the idea but it would have been an absolute monster of a post. The point of this blog is to inform you (and me), not bore you (and me) to death.

So that’s the excuse, but what’s to be covered in this post? Answer – create dimension load files programmatically through the Metadata Builder so that you never have to it again. Will it be as easy as selecting Flying Pizza (that’s a punch card in Jane’s left hand for those of you born after 1980 and also just what is Flying Pizza)? Just about, with a wee bit of customization.

Foodarackacycle

Something that XF’s competitors ought to read

Yes, way back in the introduction to TheTruthAboutCPM when I said that this blog wouldn’t be about other products I meant it. Alas and alack, I fear I do need to address an important

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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 2.3 — Building deletions in dimensions

The final third

The last two posts on dimension building have focused on building dimensions either by hand or via the Metadata Builder. But what about deleting members?

You may not make mistakes but Yr. Obt. Svt. is, unfortunately, all too well familiar with, “Aw, bugger, I didn’t mean to add those 10,000 products/200 entities/14 departments/etc. I really didn’t mean to. Bugger. And now I need to get rid of some or all of them. Triple bugger.” Mayhaps you too have done so? Let’s hope so as how to do that is the point of this, the third and final (Hah! No, part four of three is now planned. Also, I can’t count.) part of this series on managing hierarchies.

Driving a manual

Stick shifts (or if you’re perverse and have an old car, a three on a tree, or if you’re really crazy, a Wilson preselector, or if you’re ultra cool, an epicyclic transmission which I finally learnt how to use) are a key component of driving enjoyment because of the control they provide. Wind out the engine way past a “reasonable” rpm just to hear the exhaust bark, hold it in gear round a corner …

A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 2.2 — Building dimensions in batch

Don’t do it, the manual bit

In our last exciting installment, Yr. Obt. Svt. took you on a trip through the most basic of dimension building processes, to wit, building a dimension by hand.

That’s all well and good but it doesn’t really reflect true application development and administration as doing just about anything by hand (sawing wood, cutting the lawn, filling out that 1040A, casting a budget, etc.) is painful for anything other than one-offs, a small scope, or something that hardly ever changes. Repetitive actions should be automated else we revert to paper ledgers and spreadsheets, fountain pens (actually, I use one), and green eyeshades. Instead, I daresay and hope you’ll do most of your loading from batch.

But how oh how oh how does your average geek load a dimension?

One way might be to take an existing dimension, extract it to a file (in OneStream XF aka XF that’s an XML file whose format I’ll cover in the next post – see how I’m stringing you along?) and then use that file to load said dimension in again to this application or to another. Hint: this sentence just described how to migrate dimensionality

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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 2.1 — Building dimensions manually

A geek’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a blog post for?

With extensive apologies to Rabbie Burns aka the Bard of Ayrshire aka the Ploughman Poet (I hope that every lit prof I had in school is now beyond happy that I can remember a line from Andrea del Sarto – see, I did pay attention, sometimes) I had high hopes that I could cover the entire OneStream dimension build process from thinking about it to building and editing it manually to loading and editing it from external sources. Whew. And that’s not even counting applying said dimension to a cube. Double whew.

It’s simply too much to cover in a single blog post so I’ll ~~disappoint you bitterly~~ relieve you and me considerably by reducing scope as splitting this into multiple posts is the only way to reasonably approach the subject.

Along the way I’ll try to explain as much of the architecture and philosophy behind OSXF’s (I’m too lazy to write out OneStream XF more than once per post) metadata management but there will be much that I shan’t and can’t cover yet. There’s a lot going on and a lot of functionality that isn’t …