About Planning and Essbase Block Storage System Templates

All system templates are available as wizards in Calculation Manager. Working with system templates in a wizard makes the templates easier to use in a business rule, and reduces potential calculation script syntax errors.

The design time prompts available in system templates are filtered based on the choices you make when following the wizard. For example, the Aggregation system template displays a step for selecting dense dimensions to aggregate, but if there are no dense dimensions available for aggregation, there are no dense dimensions to select from the dropdown list in the step. This can happen when all of the dense dimensions are used in the upper FIX statement.

The template can detect what dimensions are used in the member range of the business rule into which you drop it. For example, if you drop an aggregation template into the member range of a rule, and if this member range includes all dense dimensions, the step for dense dimension aggregation in the template is not displayed. This prevents calculation script errors, since Essbase scripts do not allow aggregation of a dimension within a FIX statement when this dimension is already used. For example, if, in a business rule, the member range is made of children (YearTotal), the aggregation on period is not allowed.

If you include a system template in an upper member range, the system template can detect this. If a system template is dropped into a member range component (that is, a Fix statement), which implies that the dimensions used in that member range should not be used in a formula, then these dimensions are not displayed in the wizard. This reduces the potential for calculation script syntax errors when you are using system templates. For example, if the Allocate system template is used in a member range component that is made of entities, then the Entity dimension is not displayed as a dimension in which an allocation can be performed.

Calculation Manager includes these system templates for Planning and Essbase block storage applications: