Analyzer 6.5: Linking Table to a combo box

Question

I created a combo box containing all month from January to December.If the user select for example December, he should get on the report the actual month (=December) and the privious month (=November).How can I do this with analyzer?Additional question: How can I solve this problem when the user select January and he should get January and December on the report?Help is very appreciated.

Answer 1

Depending on how your outline is set up, there are a few different ways you can do this.For starters if you only need to see current month and previous month, then you might want to look at using substitution variables.Assuming you are not looking to use substituion variables because you are looking to give your users a solution that allows them to go back more than one month, you might want to try something like the following. (It might seem a bit long, but since you are dealing with the time dimension and would only need to repeat the process once for each month, it shouldn't take too long to put it in place.)Here's what you can do:When selecting members for your combo box, you should select the top member of you Time Dimension, for instance 'Year Tot'.Once 'Year Tot' shows on the right side of the selection list, you can right click on it and a menu will come up asking if you also want to include children, descendents, etc.; choose at the bottom of the list "Select Subset". Once there, you want to choose from the drop down, 'Expression Contained is', and type the member name 'Nov', (click the add button), then choose 'Expression Contained is' and type the member name 'Dec' (click the add button). Now go to the advanced button and change your connector from 'And' to 'Or'. Click okay.(Basically you are creating a subset that will return November Or December)You now have a member added to your drop down box called "Year Tot" (or whatever you time dim member name is) Rename 'Year Tot' to "Dec" and click okay. You now have a member in your drop down list called 'Dec' that really represents a subset which includes both Nov and Dec. When users click on Dec in the combo box they will see Nov and Dec in the grid.You would then repeat these steps for each month.As far as January showing The current year January and the previous year December, that can be a little tricky. I'm assuming your time dimsnsion is NOT set up as a fiscal year cross over model and instead you have one dimension with your months and then a scenario type dimension with your years. One solution is to add a 13th month to your month's dimension that does not consolidate. The 13th month can be named 'Prior Yr Dec' You would then write a calc script in Essbase to copy your Dec numbers to Prior Yr Dec. (ie "Prior Yr Dec"->2004 = Dec->2003)Once you have this done, you could easily implement the steps above and achieve the results you are looking for.Best Regards,