Typically in Essbase, an individual hierarchy has the same number of members above it as any other member at the same level. In a ragged hierarchy, the logical parent member for one member is not in the level directly above the member. When downloading to results a query that has a ragged member selection, and where some parent members are not expanded to details, a warning message is displayed: "Note that if the source query results are not fully expanded and/or symmetric, invalid flattened results might be returned." This message is necessary to show “parent context” or shared member parents need to exist in the query in order to determine that they are shared for the results set.
In the following example Qtr2 does not have children in the query. Because only the lowest level members are included in the query, the results set includes: Jan, Feb, Mar, and Qtr2. For the “month” value for Qtr2, the label is blank.
Table 57. Ragged Hierarchy in Results Set
| Quarter | Month | Gen1,Product | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qtr1 | Jan | Product | 8024 |
| Qtr1 | Feb | Product | 8346 |
| Qtr1 | Mar | Product | 8333 |
| Qtr2 | (blank) | Product | 27107 |
If a child member does not have a parent member in the original query, the parent or any other ancestor is included in the Results set: