Time Dim - only want dates thru current month

[cogadmin12]

Hello,

I know that the date range in a date dim is controlled through the settings of "earliest date" and "latest date".  But I'm trying to get Transformer to create date categories, down to the month level, only through the current month and NOT for all months in 2015.

I was hoping by setting the inclusion on the Month level to "include when needed", that would make Transformer only generate the Jan 2015 category and NOT the other 11 month categories for 2015.  This is with the "latest Date" as 12/31/2100.

I suppose I could create an MDL script to set the "latest date" to the desired month before each cube build.  But that would be painful....

Any ideas of the combination of date dim and/or level settings to achieve my desired result?

Thanks,
CogAdmin12

[bdbits]

For what it's worth, I have my date dim levels set to "Default (when needed)" and only get dates that have associated facts. But, my date dim is table-based with dates out to 2020. I am not sure if it works the same with a Transformer-generated time dim.

[cogadmin12]

I ended up scripting an MDL command that looks like:

DimUpdate "Time" EarliestDate 20090101 LatestDate 20150101

The value for LatestDate will get automatically changed in the MDL snippet as my database values change.  This works for me, as my cube measures use a Time State Rollup of "Last Period".   That means I cannot have extra months in my current quarter (2015 Q1) because my values would be "zero" (i.e. March) instead of the correct values for Feb.

Note that in the cube build, the -m command line option allows you to specify an MDL script.

CogAdmin12

[bdbits]

Been meaning to look into the scripting for production transfers, where we have to change deployment locations. I found an article on just that a while back at https://www.ironsidegroup.com/2014/03/31/change-transformer-file-and-server-locations-using-an-mdl-script/.

As annoyed as I sometimes get at the lack of attention Cognos seems to pay to Transformer, it does have some nifty features like this.

Cool solution.