Macros and updating admin links daily

[aptech135]

Is there some sort of macro and/or process that can be established to automatically update an admin link every day. I am loading actuals in daily from another contributor app and I cannot match the days as the future days are zeros and will overwrite the forecast data. I need to update the admin link every day to pull the previous days actuals, any way at all to automate this task?

[ovo]

There is no way to externally edit allocations in an Admin Link.  You will probably need to find another way - Proabably importing data to the IM tables (eg using an ETL tool to control data for your targetted days) or being creative with Analyst - Contributor links (if data volumes are small)

[ykud]

Is there some sort of macro and/or process that can be established to automatically update an admin link every day. I am loading actuals in daily from another contributor app and I cannot match the days as the future days are zeros and will overwrite the forecast data. I need to update the admin link every day to pull the previous days actuals, any way at all to automate this task?

Build a special application that will:
1 load all fact data in one cube
2 load current forecast date in another
3  use @Date function to calculate today's data and build a mapping for correct fact loading
4 combine cubes data using mapping from 3 and send it to your target app

[nbarsley]

Build a special application that will:
1 load all fact data in one cube
2 load current forecast date in another
3  use @Date function to calculate today's data and build a mapping for correct fact loading
4 combine cubes data using mapping from 3 and send it to your target app

Can you please go into more detail about how to set up the links in step 3 and 4? I don't really understand how to map the links correctly.

[ykud]

Can you please go into more detail about how to set up the links in step 3 and 4? I don't really understand how to map the links correctly.

Your aim is to build some kind of allocation cube based on current date (returned by the @Date Bif). But you can't directly use allocation cubes with elist in contributor, so a workaround is required (see this post on the topic).
Let's get on with simple example with months.
The "allocation cube".

	Current Date	Some Calculations Here to get the next column	Fact or Forecast
Jan	03/03/07		Fact
Feb	03/03/07		Fact
Mar	03/03/07		Forecast

Then you have 2 cubes, one with fact (it has a "Fact" dummy dimension), and another with forecast (with "Forecast")
And the target cube looks like

	Jan	Feb	Mar
Number of apples sold
Number of oranges sold
# Fact or Forecast	Fact	Fact	Forecast

And you do 2 accumulation links in this cube (from Fact cube, targeting the virtual "Fact" and a similar for "Forecast"), which solves the problem, in my opinion.

 

[nbarsley]

ok I managed to get my forecast updates to work correctly. I actually don't need to update my actuals daily, only after every period close. This is a high level overview of what I did.

1. Set up a cube which brings in the most current closed period data from our sql server. The cube has an IF statement which returns a "YES" if the most current closed period is greater or equal to the period ID numbers
2. Created a link which brings the current year actual data and current year forecast data and stores the data in temp cubes.
3. Created a link which brings the current year actual data into my Analyst forecast model.
4. Created a link to send the data from the Analyst forecast model back into my contributor model.
5. Set up a macro which runs the links to bring down the data into Analyst. Then runs @sliceupdate which uses a the condition YES to bring over only the current year actuals into the forecast model. Then runs @cubeupdate on the forecast cube. Then runs the link which sends the forecast model data back into my Contributor model.

[ykud]

I liked SliceUpdate part :)

I'd be using @Date instead of IID's just to be bulletproof.