Peter Eb. : AddIn

PerformancePoint Server 2007 SP3 released

petereb — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Finally made it out the door ! For the AddIn I have a couple notes: Besides the usual rollup of hotfixes (bug fixes) there is a new feature: Line Item Details (LIDs). This was supported by the server but not on the client side, and now it is! We did our...(read more)

Excel 2010 is better than the PPS Planning AddIn

petereb — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:00:00 GMT

Although the model of using an Excel AddIn can be a little clunky (especially for what PPS Planning called the contributor scenario) I think my team did a pretty good job getting some very usable reporting elements. Now I get to point you to things my...(read more)

Radio Silence

petereb — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Well radio silence has been maintained quite successfully. Sorry for the lack of updates but with Planning development ended I haven't had a lot to say… Office 2010 (aka Office 14) is finally starting to see the light of day. I know some of you by now...(read more)

Extended absences and other people doing my job for me!

petereb — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 12:00:07 GMT

Its been quite a while since I've posted. I've still been hanging out in the PPS TechNet forums, but just haven't been finding as much time to post. I've had a little change in job duties that are taking some time to adjust to. Anyway I'm very pleased...(read more)

SP1

petereb — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 05:22:17 GMT

If you haven’t seen it yet the english builds are available! http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3444589&SiteID=17 I have some details about the addin performance improvements http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3445168&SiteID=17...(read more)

When will data appear in the cube after a submit from the PPS Planning Business Client?

petereb — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

It's actually hard to say. This process is asynchronous which is why the status is initially Pending, then WaitProcess, then finally Partial/Submitted. See my other posts about assignment statuses and assignment actions for more details and a quick overview....(read more)

HOWTO: Dynamic rows or columns with a dimension property filter

petereb — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

To filter rows and columns by a filter selection has previously been discussed here . But one thing you might not have noticed is that the list of property values (aka the filter scope) is static. If a new member property appears the form needs to be...(read more)

HOWTO: Filter rows and columns by selecting from a filter

petereb — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

(Sorry for the gap since my last post, things have been a bit busy lately in Peter Eb. land…) One simple way to do this filtering is to enable suppress blank rows or suppress blank columns. Then when there is no data (non-null) in the cube for those rows/columns...(read more)

What does this PPS Planning workflow action mean?

petereb — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Workflow handles jobs, cycles, assignments and more. In keeping with my focus on the PPS Planning Business Client (aka Add-In for Excel), this post will just cover those actions related to assignments. In keeping with my new analogy of describing workflow...(read more)

HOWTO: Select a time range that is dynamic (updates over time for a rolling forecast)

petereb — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

There are 2 kinds of ranges that the PPS Planning Member Picker supports: 1) From the selected member to an offset from current period (or vice versa). 2) Or from an offset from the current period to another offset from the current period. (It's also possible to simply use an offset from the current period without a range specified). When using the member picker with Time look for the special dropdown that appears - hopefully this isn't surprising - called...."Time"!...(read more)

HOWTO: Hide filters for dimensions that confuse users

petereb — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

For data entry forms (and even some reports) its pretty important to keep contributors focused on their specific task. Its especially easy for users who are not familiar with OLAP or PPS to be confused by some things: "TimeDataView" and "Business Process"...(read more)

What does this status "xyz" mean for my assignments?

petereb — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Workflow in PPS Planning is completely asynchronous. This allows the server side to scale and handle many, many simultaneous submissions, job requests etc. Its possible to add more server's to the pool that handles this asynchronous queue. From the add-in...(read more)

What does the error "filter selection for dimension XYZ is not in the filter scope"?

petereb — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:00:24 GMT

This is a confusing error for users and form authors alike, especially since the add-in help does not have a glossary entry for "filter scope". I fear I came up with the error text, so I apologize. So to hopefully rectify this situation, we...(read more)

HOWTO: Make 1 filter control more than 1 matrix

petereb — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:00:58 GMT

A common request by form authors is to create a "start here" worksheet page where contributors can change some global filters. Then they advance to other worksheets in the workbook to do their actual data entry. Other times authors just want to link multiple...(read more)

Why not use the "where clause" for filters instead of "on pages"?

petereb — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Short answer: In SP1 the PPS Planning add-in will use the where clause and life for MDX experts will be back to normal.*

Long answer: Because of the extra properties needed for writeback. The CellSet returned by AdoMd.Net does not return member properties for members specified in the where clause. What additional properties the add-in needs is a topic for another post. In many cases nobody notices that by putting the filter selections on pages (which is more like a crossjoin of a single element than a where filter) that there is any difference in the filter. But everybody notices when they take try to run the Matrix query in most other MDX tools like SQL Management Studio:

Executing the query ...
Obtained object of type: Microsoft.AnalysisServices.AdomdClient.CellSet
Formatting.
Results cannot be displayed for cellsets with more than two axes.
Execution complete

(Trust me, that display error irritates me an awful lot, just so you know I feel your pain if you don't like this. It's definitely something I am very excited about in SP1 that won't impact many users. But for the troubleshooters I think it is a fantastic luxury to just cut and paste the query for a change...ok you will still have to search and replace $CurrentPeriod$...)

In the matrix itself we don't really render a multi-dimensional result, we just render the first slice so that it looks like a 2D result. (And for our query we try hard to make sure that the 3D result we produce only has a single slice returned which is equivalent a 2D result and no extra data is queried other than the member properties).

So in practice the "on pages" approach worked well to simplify the rendering engine at first. But crucially there are some cases we've found where it degrades performance of the MDX query. And at least in current builds of AS2005 that PPS depends on, the cost of running an extra query to retrieve the missing member properties is negligible. So we were able to make this change in SP1. There simply wasn't enough time for us to have made this change earlier - and I don't remember if when we were working with pre-release versions of AS2005 if the second query for properties was always of negligible cost.

Another convenient side effect of this change in SP1 is that the filter selection is now conveniently available in custom MDX scenarios...but that, of course, is another post.

* As of this writing I can't promise any dates for SP1. All I've seen is what it pretty commonly known: spring 2008. We of course have an internal schedule and targets, but software releases are not easy. When the date is known and "official", It will be posted quite widely, on clearly "official" microsoft.com sites, including the technet forums as soon as there's an official date. (Oh and don't worry, asfaik the core PPS dev/test/pm team is based in the northern hemisphere so spring isn't 6 months away.)