I was wondering if anyone has successfully built a Rolling forecast application with an automatec time scale? What I would like to achieve is that every quarter or month when the timescale should be adjusted (i. e some months deleted from the time scale and some new to be added), I want an administrator to just run an Analyst macro that updates the time scale. This is quite easy with other dimensions (just run an import link for the dimensions, targetting a view in a dataware house or similar), but more tricky with a time scale since you need to specify dates for the new months that have been added to the dimension.
I was thinking that I can't be the first one to run into this problem since rolling forecast should be quite common Planning apps, but I have searched the Cognos web site for best practise or similar but haven't found anything on this
I think the trick here is to have the name of the DList Item correspond to something that the dates in the timescale can understand.
I just ran a test to make sure but if you name your timescale items something like Jan-2009, Feb-2009 then Analyst will attempt to automatically determine the dates for that item. Using the example above it worked for me. You get limited as to how you can name your timescale items because of this but it will allow for the automatic update.
Thanks - much easier than I thought works perfect when I have renamed the items in the time scale to Month - year