Tag: Dimensions

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 …