Working with UDAs

You can use user-defined attributes (UDAs), descriptive words or phrases, within calc scripts, member formulas, and reports. UDAs return lists of members associated with the UDA. For example:

You can use the HSP_UDF UDA to prevent a formula from being overwritten when the application is refreshed. You must log on to each database associated with the Planning application and create the member formula with a UDA. The syntax for this UDA is: (UDAs: HSP_UDF).
If you use the @XREF function to look up a data value in another database to calculate a value from the current database, you can add the HSP_NOLINK UDA to members to prevent the @XREF function from being created on all plan types that are not the source plan type selected for that member.
For a Product dimension with several product members, you can create a UDA called New Products and assign this UDA to the new products in the Product dimension hierarchy. Then you can base certain calculations on the designation New Products.
For the budget review process, rather than creating a data validation rule for each owner in a product line (some product lines can have hundreds of owners), you can create a UDA containing the user names that apply to members using the planning unit hierarchy. Then in the data validation rule, you can enter a lookup function which will return the user names stored in the UDA for the current member. For example, create a UDA for each user in the promotional path and assign a prefix to the UDA name (for example, ProdMgr:Kim).

For more information on creating and using UDAs, see Considerations for Working with Essbase and Oracle Essbase Database Administrator's Online Help.

UDAs are specific to dimensions. For example, creating a UDA for an Account member makes it available for non-shared Account members. Deleting it removes it for all Account members. To make UDAs available for multiple dimensions, create the same UDA for multiple dimensions. For example, create a UDA named New for Account and Entity dimensions to make the UDA named New available for Account and Entity members.

To select UDAs for members:

Select Administration, then Manage, then Dimensions.
Select the dimension for whose members to associate the UDA.
From the dimension hierarchy, select a member and click Edit.
Select UDA.
Optional: To create a UDA, click Add.
Select UDAs for the member by moving them to Selected UDA and clicking Save:
- move selected UDAs
- remove selected UDAs
- remove all UDAs