What does "scope" mean?

[halkosj]

None of us really understand what scope means - we've read the documentation, looked online, etc. For example, we're getting a bunch of levels that are red, which supposedly means there are missing columns. We're not sure what this means - where are these columns supposedly missing from? To create the level, I dragged the column from the data sources pane to the Dimension Map - so how could it be missing? Data Source Viewer shows that nothing is missing at all.

And when it says a level is defined indirectly, what does that mean? If a level comes from a column in a data source, how can it be more direct than that?

[MFGF]

Hi,

Scope can refer to different situations within Transformer, but here I'm guessing you are referring to Measure Scope?  If so, then I'd guess you have data coming in from multiple data sources as this situation can give rise to measure scope errors.

The issue is that your measures are in one query, and your dimensional descriptions are in another query.

Firstly, you need to make sure Transformer understands how these relate to each other - usually by ensuring that the data sources have a common like-named data item (eg Product Number could be in both the Product and Measure data sources).

Secondly, where you have used items from your Product data source in a dimension, you also need to identify to Transformer that Product Number is a unique value (ie no two products can have the same number).  Unless you do this, Transformer cannot link the measures to the dimension, since the Product Number on each measure row could in theory belong to more than one member of the Product Dimension.  In this situation, the Product Number level would appear red in the Measure Scope diagram as a visual cue to you that the measures cannot be linked in unless the level is marked as Unique.  To fix the issue, right-click on the Product Number level and go into its properties window and check the 'Unique' checkbox.  Once you have done this, the red colour should disappear, and the higher levels will then appear yellow to indicate that the measures are in scope.

MF.