Representing a product BOM (from a relational source) in cognos DMR?

[mmartins]

Has anyone taken a product BOM (variable depth tree) from a relational source and successfully brought it over into Cognos FM?

I've read about bridge tables as a way to describe the nodes of the tree and so on, but I can't find any concrete information on correctly transforming something like a product bill materials in a way that it can be modeled into Cognos for analysis (which is what we're trying to do).

Can someone point me in the right direction?  I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
M

[blom0344]

My 2 cents would be to pre-process the Bill of Materials (using recursive SQL techniques) and adding the resultset to the Cognos model. Unless the depth is known beforehand (say 2-3 levels) I suspect you will have a serious problem. Either performance-wise or getting the recursiveness modelled. With a fixed depth there are ways to do it in the model..

[MFGF]

I fully endorse what Blom says.  Parent-Child schemas like this are notoriously difficult to model, and the general advice is to flatten them and identify all possible levels before the FM stage.  Historically, Cognos has tended to steer people towards tools like Data Manager to resolve these kinds of issues.

Regards,

MF.