About Dimensions
A dimension is a high-level hierarchy type that is based on a table which must be defined in Oracle Sales Compensation. A dimension may be defined for one of two reasons:
- A dimension may be used to define a hierarchy that you use to define rules
Defining a dimension hierarchy can save you the trouble of having to create a complicated rule. For example, in Figure 3 - 9, the Industries Dimension holds the hierarchy information for the table Industries (which had to be defined in SQL*Plus first). The customer number is used to identify each customer uniquely. The advantage of defining a dimension hierarchy for Industries is that you do not have to define the hierarchy as part of your revenue class rollup, where you would have to define rules for each revenue class at the lowest level of the rollup, which, in this case, would be the customer number. See Arranging Revenue Classes into a Hierarchy for information about revenue classes.
Following the example illustrated in Figure 3 - 9, suppose that the salespeople's compensation is based on the industry to which they sell; in this case, you need to define separate revenue classes for the different types of industries. If you want to define a rule, for example, for the Entertainment industry revenue class, you can do so with the following values:
Hierarchy Name: Industries
Hierarchy Value: Entertainment
When a customer number is part of the transaction information collected from a source such as Oracle Receivables, Oracle Sales Compensation refers to the Industries hierarchy you defined to determine which revenue class the transaction should be classified under, thereby affecting how the salesperson who made the sale is compensated.
- A dimension may be defined to hold the primary and foreign key links between Oracle Sales Compensation and other tables.
Primary and foreign key links let you collect relevant information about transactions coming into Oracle Sales Compensation from tables in other products such as Oracle Receivables or another source.
By default, Oracle Sales Compensation provides two dimensions: Salespeople and Revenue Classes. You can define other dimensions for your organization such as customer or product code dimensions and use them for rules classification. You can create as many dimensions as you need.
In order to define a dimension in Oracle Sales Compensation, these criteria must be met:
- The dimension must be based on an existing table in the database.
- The table must be defined in the Tables and Columns form in Oracle Sales Compensation.
- The database table must have either:
- A numeric primary key assigned or
- No primary key and numeric columns in the table
- The table information defined in the Tables and Columns form must accurately describe the table.
- There can be only one dimension per base table
